


Connie Swap Episode 37: Injecting Some Fun

by br42, BurdenKing, MjStudioArts



Series: Connie Swap [37]
Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Anxiety, Art, Drama, F/F, F/M, Friendship, Gen, Momswap, Pictures, Romance, Slice of Life, Steven Universe AU, connverse - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-09-23 04:33:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 45,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20334124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/br42/pseuds/br42, https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurdenKing/pseuds/BurdenKing, https://archiveofourown.org/users/MjStudioArts/pseuds/MjStudioArts
Summary: Just because you're stranded on a hostile planet with an urgent mission to do while being pursued by rebel agents doesn't mean you can't also have a good time.





	1. Day One

Connie slept on her side, a woolly blanket pulled up to her chin, her arms curled in tightly across her chest as if her sleeping self were trying to conserve space. In contrast with her arms, however, her legs were splayed out forward at nearly a right angle to her upper body, forming a position that Connie called 'the L-shape' and what Lapis called 'a real bed-hogging pain in the butt during a sleepover.'

It was chilly, being mid-November in Delmarva, but that didn't wake Connie. It was noisy, clangs, bangs, and even a few imprecations coming from the kitchen area, but the noise-canceling device on Connie's nightstand meant that didn't wake Connie. It was a very considerate birthday present from her mom, a fact which was reinforced daily.

Instead, acrid smoke from the kitchen wafted over, causing Connie to wrinkle her nose in her sleep. Her brows furrowed and the girl stirred slightly but she was unwilling to rouse. Then the tip of her nose wiggled --a bunny-like gesture that never failed to elicit a 'D'aww!' from Steven-- the girl drew in a sharp breath, and she sneezed, wakefulness thrust on her unceremoniously even as the noise-canceling device swallowed up the sound of her ‘achoo!’

Blearily, Connie rose to a seated position, groping around her nightstand for a tissue while squinting at the Beach House interior. As she sniffed into the Kleenex, it wasn't the short, green figure struggling in the kitchen that drew her attention but rather the short, pale figure peering at her through the window seat window.

Connie's mouth moved without apparent sound. The girl looked momentarily surprised before she huffed and tapped the noise-canceling gift, turning it off. "Onion?" she asked, audible this time.

"-peak of frustration. Nothing is scaled to this height and-" The muttering from Mom stopped and the green gem's face rose over the sink as she climbed a short step ladder. "Dear? Did you say something?" She had to peer left and right to see around where Bismuth's gemstone was resting on the countertop, a plastic tiara precariously balanced atop the rainbow-colored gemstone, a prank of Lapis' just waiting for the smith to reform.

Connie stood up, the trade from warm covers to cool air a bracing one even though her winter pajamas left only her hands and feet bare. She started down the stairs of her loft, right hand steadying her against the wall since she was still a little wobbly on her feet. "Yeah. Onion is staring at us from the porch, though."

She reached the reinforced inner door of the Beach House and opened it, though she closed all but a two-inch gap when a blast of cold, winter air swept over her, sending goosebumps racing across her skin.

"Onion, you shouldn't be out there," she chided, peering through the gap, her voice carrying through the closed, outer screen door. "The porch and stairs are still damaged from the crash. Plus, it's kind of creepy."

Onion stared at her in silence for a few more seconds before moving for the damaged stairs down, walking in a broad 'U' across the battered porch to keep a wide berth between him and Connie, eyes never leaving the girl for more than a second. Connie didn't close the door until a full thirty seconds after Onion had descended from sight despite the frigid air. "Weird," she muttered, making a point of turning the deadbolt to lock the door.

Weird but, Connie had to admit, not all that weird for Onion. She knew Yellowtail's family was one of the few to have returned to Beach City before the governmental cleanup efforts were complete. They were living out of the fisherman's boat like Steven's family was living out of their bus. And like the Universes, Yellowtail and Vidalia were working to get their home cleaned up after the town had been rocked by double shockwaves and a smattering of ejecta following the handship's crash.

"That was indeed curious," agreed Mom. Standing on her tiptoes, she pulled a smoking skillet off an active burner, shook her head darkly, then walked a little unsteadily over toward Connie. "And I really must prioritize rebuilding the structurally unsound elements of the Beach House's exterior.” Then short arms gripped Connie around her middle as she was pulled into a hug. "Regardless, good morning my... daughter."

Connie smiled and hugged her mom back, her head resting on the short gem's cushiony yellow hair. "Good morning, Mom."

The two basked in the terms of address for a moment before parting.

Her mom's face fell into a grimace. "While I didn't accidentally engage the fire suppression system this time, I'm afraid a hot breakfast is currently beyond me."

Connie gave her mom a sympathetic shoulder squeeze. "That's okay. Cereal and milk is fine." Admittedly, it'd be more fine when it wasn't so chilly, but she kept that observation to herself.

Peridot nodded and was about to say more when there was a chime and a column of light at the warp pad.

Jasper and Lapis stepped clear, the latter saying, "And that's when I realized the whole thing about rabbit's feet being lucky was bupkis. After all, if they were, you'd never be able to catch the rabbit to get their foot in the first place!"

Jasper offered a slight nod. "Maybe they cancel out," she suggested.

Lapis stopped on her way to the living room to look at the Quartz. "Huh?"

"One foot is lucky. Maybe two aren't," and Jasper strode over to lean at her preferred spot by the kitchen divider.

The blue gem considered this with open curiosity. "Huh, I never thought of that. Forget leprechauns, a five-legged rabbit should be the poster child for luck." She shook her head, long hair swaying with the motion. "Man, if that Trix rabbit was rockin' another leg, those kids would never get his cereal."

"Speaking of cereal," intruded Mom, "Lapis, Jasper, give Connie a good morning hug so she can then prepare her own." The gem sighed. "My attempts at a hot breakfast were stymied by…” She looked briefly at her too-short arms. “-impracticalities."

Lapis hugged Connie then pulled her in for a brief noogie before Connie wriggled free. As Jasper gave the girl a half hug, she turned to Peridot and said, "I can cook."

Mom paused in her attempt to scrape burnt food off a skillet into the trash can to answer. "That's a considerate gesture, but it is my understanding that your culinary repertoire extended only to lunch and dinner fare."

Jasper nodded then gestured to Peridot. "Yeah but you know the recipe." She strode around to join the short gem in the kitchen. "Just tell me what to do."

Peridot blinked. "I... never considered that possibility," she admitted.

"J is blowing a lot of minds this morning," said Lapis as she and Connie headed for the couch together, quipping, "In Soviet Russia, OJ prepares breakfast for _you!"_

This was met with questioning stares.

"Really? No one's heard a Russian reversal before?" asked Lapis incredulously. "Yakov Smirnoff? Nothing? Philistines, the lot of you," she groused with faux-umbrage.

"What were you guys doing?" asked Connie, leaning in close to be heard clearly as the kitchen noises resumed.

Lapis shrugged. "What else? We were out looking for Rosy. I don't know what hole she slithered into after getting Gar-noped but she hasn't crawled back out of it that we could find."

Connie frowned but nodded. "I just kind of hoped, since you and Jasper seemed to be in a good mood, that you'd found something."

"Naw. Though I can understand why you'd think something weird was going on if me and J were being chill," teased Lapis.

"It's not-" started Connie.

"I know," replied Lapis with a smirk. "Though I'll admit it is kinda nice. Still, I'm sure one of us will put our foot in our mouth soon enough. We're not _that_ lucky."

Connie, standing on the couch cushions so she could pull a spare blanket off her bed and wrap it around herself, sat back down and said with a grin, "You would if you didn't have an even number of feet."

Lapis laughed hard enough at that that Peridot --sitting on countertop-- and Jasper --preparing scrambled eggs and pancakes under steady instruction-- both paused to look their way. By the time Lapis was attempting to shapeshift herself a third foot, they went back to their work, each smiling to one degree or another while the cooking was done to a backdrop of laughter and antics.

* * *

Jasper and Peridot, after their successful breakfast teamwork, left to go over the salvage piled up on the beach a little north of the temple.

Lapis warped out again, this time to meet up with Garnet 'to see if tri-clops can help track down her old boss.'

Dressed, fed, ready for the day, and all by herself, Connie called Steven. The phone instantly went to voicemail as if it was turned off or in an area without reception. She frowned and looked at her phone disapprovingly before calling the Universe landline instead.

The phone rang a few times before a woman answered a little breathlessly. "Good morning. Mary speaking."

"Hi Mrs. Universe. It's Connie." Sitting on a bar stool, Connie kicked lightly at the divider, expression uncertain. "Is Steven around?"

It was subtle but Connie was sure she could hear Mrs. Universe frown. "He left a little while ago on an errand." From what Steven had said, his mom had been pretty upset about his activities during the evacuation and Connie was beginning to suspect she thought the Crystal Gems in general or Connie specifically shared some of the blame. "You didn't call him?" she asked after a pause.

"I did," said Connie, "but he didn't answer. I thought- Well, do you know when he'll be back?"

She heard Steven's mom transfer the phone from one side of her head to the other, Connie mentally picturing the woman in rugged work clothes with her sleeves rolled up... before remembering it was frigid outside and there wasn't a single building in the city (the Beach House excepted) that still had all its windows intact. Her mental image changed to layered sleeves by the time Mrs. Universe said, "He promised to be back in time for dinner."

A beat and then Steven's mom's tone softened a little as she said, "He wanted to go visit an amusement park a ways from here. Wolf's giving him a ride."

_So that's where Wolf was,_ thought Connie. _He's been spending a lot of time with Steven since... Since the fight on the beach._

Connie licked her lips. "So if he's not answering my calls-"

By this point Mrs. Universe's voice was sympathetic, her earlier sharpness gone. "Maybe he just wants some space. It's been... a lot since, well, you know."

Connie nodded numbly despite not being visible to the other person in the conversation. "Yeah," she said meekly.

A sigh and then Mrs. Universe said, "I'll make sure he knows you called, Connie." The phone was shifted to the other side of her head again and Connie assumed she was holding something heavy if she needed to switch arms like that. "Was there anything else?"

"No. Thank you."

"Have a good day, Connie," said the phone.

"You too," answered the girl and ended the call.

She stared at the phone for a second longer, chewing her lower lip before frowning. Sliding off the bar stool she said to no one in particular, "I guess I'll go see if the mayor needs any help." Clean-up crews had arrived en masse recently, the mayor directing their efforts while working and living out of an RV on loan from FEMA.

Using her force fields, Connie descended carefully from the Beach House, bypassing the damaged porch and stairs.

From the cliff overlooking her, a short, pale figure watched.

* * *

"Woo!" cried Steven as he and Wolf rocketed through the colorful tunnel of Wolf-space or wherever it was you went when you howl-portaled. They emerged, Wolf coming to a sliding stop in a remote part of the parking lot for the Massachusetts amusement park called, funnily enough, The Festival. Seemed kind of generic.

Dismounting, Steven said, "Alright, Wolf, we're not in Beach City so I don't think they allow giant magical wolves into the park." He paused. "I'll ask to be sure," and Wolf barked his approval.

Just then his pocket buzzed. "Huh?" Fishing his phone out of his pocket, he tapped at the screen. "Oh, I have a missed call..." His brows furrowed. "From Connie. I guess she called while we were portaling over." He paused, indecisive for a moment before he locked the phone and slid it back into his pant pocket. "I'll call her back later when we've actually found something."

A long second of complicated feelings stretched into two, the teen chewing on the inside of his cheek.

"Anyway," said Steven getting back on track. "The plan is that I'll go in and investigate the park for clues about where Amethyst and P2 went, starting with that Mountains of Madness ride we saw them on. While I'm doing that, I want you to see if you can find their smell outside the park. I'll blow my G.E.M. whistle and meet you at the fence in half an hour so we can compare notes. Sound good?"

Wolf made a chuff of agreement.

Steven smiled. "Alright then! Secret team meeting adjourned. Synchronizing watches!" Wolf obligingly raised his front, right paw, on which was fastened a _Crying Breakfast Friends!_-themed wrist watch. Wolf's leg was too thick for the watch's strap to fit, so Steven had bridged the difference with a spare shoelace, one decorated with _CBF_ characters to stay on-theme. Toggling it to Crying Egg Timer-mode, he punched in thirty minutes, did the same for his own identical watch, and then with great ceremony started each timer in unison.

_Beep!_

"And go!" exclaimed Steven with considerable glee, the teen turning and jogging for The Festival's entrance while Wolf loped towards the patch of forest that bordered the amusement park's fence on two sides.

* * *

It was their fifth check-in, even after they'd shifted to one hour gaps instead of thirty minutes. Since it was lunchtime, and a late lunch at that, rather than meet Wolf at the fence, he'd stopped at The Diner over Innsmouth --which did surprisingly yummy fish for a park restaurant-- and walked the food out of the amusement park so he and Wolf could eat together.

By the time they were having their dessert --two Nyarlatho-pops and a wobbly dish of The King in Jello-- Steven asked, "Any luck finding their scent?"

Wolf hung his head low and snorted, which was a 'no' in Wolf-speak... Then he leaned forward, nuzzled Steven's plate, and looked at him expectantly.

"Huh?" asked Steven, glancing down to see the leftovers Wolf was eyeing: there was a half-finished The Silver Quiche and some uneaten Sweet and Sour Ermengarde. "Oh, go ahead," he offered and Wolf wasted no time, well, wolfing it down.

Steven wiped his hands on a napkin and started to tidy up, saying a little dejectedly, "I'm not having any luck either. I've checked out all the rides for clues: The Colour Out of Space Mountain, the Flying Polyp, the Necronomicoaster, even the Fall of Cthulhu and drop towers are kind of intense for me. Well, there's still The Picture in the Haunted House but it looked really scary." He scratched his ear. "Huh, I wonder what the theme is for this theme park, because I don't really get it."

After confirming that all the crumbs had been accounted for, Wolf raised his head and panted in thought. Then he pawed at Steven's pocket.

Withdrawing the phone being pawed at, Steven said, "Yeah, that's a good idea: we should look at the original clue. Maybe there's something we overlooked."

Unlocking the device, he brought up the _KBCW_ page that showed Amethyst and P2 riding The Mountains of Madness, the largest coaster in the park. Steven angled the phone so that he and Wolf could see it, although the two of them were huddled cheek-to-muzzle as they stared at the tiny screen.

Steven squinted. "Wait a minute..." and he enlarged the image on the screen, panning over to where the excited Amethyst's long, white hair was trailing behind her. He pointed at a pink blur in the gem's mane. "Look! There's cotton candy caught in her hair! They must have bought some in the park, so maybe the vendor overheard something."

Wolf licked his chops in agreement... or because he wanted some cotton candy for himself.

"I'll be back soon," announced Steven, energized once more. He jogged back to the entrance, presented the armband on his wrist (decorated with weird, squiggly star shapes) to the bored man working the ticket booth, and hustled inside in search of someone selling cotton candy.

It took him two passes to find because the cotton candy cart was wedged between the _Cool Air_ Ice Cream booth and a concession stand that served alcoholic drinks. A tanned woman wrapped in a colorful scarf, with frizzy brown hair escaping out the bottom of her blue beanie sat on a raised chair just behind a cart laden with bags of cotton candy. She looked about Sadie's age, her attention divided between a textbook balanced in her lap and the foot traffic of potential customers. She looked up and smiled as Steven walked over, standing up and setting the book facedown and open in the seat behind her.

Her nametag read 'Marianna' and she was wearing a Miskatonic University sweater.

"Hello. Would you like some cotton candy?" she asked chipperly through a strong Boston accent, the word 'cotton' sounding like '_cawh'in_.'

"Actually, what I'm looking for," and Steven paused for dramatic effect, "are answers." He leaned on the cotton candy cart and grinned.

The college student/vendor went from surprised to intrigued swiftly. "Really?" she asked, batting at a stray bit of frizzy hair that was blowing in her face. "Go on," she invited.

Pulling out his phone, he brought up the _KBCW_ picture of Amethyst and P2. "These two were spotted at this park recently." He zoomed in on Amethyst. "This one has cotton candy caught in her hair. Cotton candy that she bought from you, perhaps?"

Marianna crossed her arms but her lips remained quirked into a grin. "What if she did?"

"I'd be very interested to know if either of them said where they were going next," answered Steven, tapping the side of his nose and winking.

He wasn't sure what that meant, exactly, but it's what Dad did whenever he was being conspiratorial, like that time Dad had snuck out of bed for a midnight slice of pie, caught Steven snooping around for his birthday presents, and said, 'I didn't see anything if you didn't.' Tap. Wink.

"You wanna know what I think, bro?" asked Marianna, smirking.

Steven nodded.

"I think yah prankin' me, got a friend filming this for yah TubeTube channel or sumin'." She raised her hand to silence his objection, saying, "But I'm just here to study for finals and sell cotton candy. You can have yah fun so long as you buy sumin'."

Steven's eyes narrowed and he gave a knowing nod. With a dramatic flourish he withdrew his wallet and slid a bill across the cart. "One cotton candy please."

Marianna's cheeks dimpled at her grin. She took the bill then unclipped a bag of pink-and-blue cotton candy from the side of the cart. "One beg of cotton candy for yah." She brushed frizzy hair from her face again. "Yeah, I saw them. Two days ago. Kind of stick out when yah pahple and green."

Steven pocketed the phone, then opened the bag and popped a wad of spun sugar in his mouth. He swallowed and asked, "Did they say anything interesting while they were here? Where they wanted to go next, maybe, or if they were planning anything?" He finished the sentence by plucking another bit of cotton candy free. He savored the feeling of it dissolving on his tongue while he watched Marianna's face, studying her reaction.

The college student tried to sit down but discovered there was a textbook in her chair. Flashing Steven an embarrassed look, she closed it hastily and shoved it in the backpack hanging off the back of her seat. Then she sat down and said, "Hypothetically speaking, bro, if those two did have a convahsation in front of my caht, it would have been aftah ordahing a lot of cotton candy and then not paying fah it."

_That... definitely sounds like Amethyst,_ conceded Steven. He slid another bill across the cart and snagged a second bag of cotton candy for himself.

The bill disappeared into the register and Marianna said, "A _lot_ of cotton candy. I had-" 

She went silent as an adult couple walked over to the concession stand, one of them ordering 'a Great Cold One and a Pickman's Modelo.'

After they walked off, she started again, saying, "I had to pay fah it myself to balance the till and that's not cheap, even with the employee discount." A beat. "Hypothetically."

Steven slid a larger bill across the cart and took two more bags, finding it a little difficult to hold them all without squishing any.

Marianna only raised a single eyebrow and said, "That pahple one was wicked hungry."

With a sigh, Steven bought another five bags, clearing out most of her remaining inventory. The frizzy-haired woman helped him by pulling a clear plastic trash bag from beneath the cart and transferring all nine of the cotton candies he'd purchased into it.

She handed it over to him after tying the top with a simple knot and earning a wordless 'thank you' from the teen. Then she said, "That should covah it. Thanks bro. Yeah, so the pahple one was dragging the green one around, wicked excited; wanted to ride all the rides. Saw them running around for half the day. Befah grabbing most of my begs, the pahple one says they have to go to this wahtah pahk next. Stahts describing it and I'm all, 'That's Hahshawpahk in Keystone, bro. It's closed for the wintah.'"

Steven stopped her, setting down his trash bag of cotton candy so he'd have hands free to bring it up on his phone. After him needing Marianna to repeat the water park's name three times without success, she grew impatient and punched it into the phone for him.

"Oh, Hersheypark," he said, seeing it spelled out.

"Yeah," said Marianna while pointing at his phone, "Hahshawpahk. Fun place when it's open. Anyway, the green one says sumin' like, 'I'm sure I can manage to engage a primitive pump system,' and then they ordah most of my stuff and run off."

Steven's eyebrows shot up. "Wow, great! This is really good information, thank you!"

The vendor shrugged. "I mean, you paid fah it, but yah welcome."

He made sure to save a bookmark of the water park's website and then pocketed the phone, grabbing his trash bag of cotton candy. He was just about to run off when he froze, then asked, "Did you see how they left?"

If that pod Connie said they escaped the handship in was able to fly around like the shuttle in _Star Trek_ then he and Wolf were going to be in for a really hard time catching them.

"I did, actually. The pahple one looked like a helicoptah with a face and the green one was pullin' a Mary Poppins, flying aftah her with, like, her ahm or sumin'," said Marianna rather matter-of-factly.

Steven blinked. "And that didn't seem strange to you?"

The college student gave him a level stare for a second before pointing to the name on her sweater. "I've seen weirdah."

With that Steven wished Marianna a good day and sprinted for the exit. Wolf received the news of their new destination with interest, though he was distracted until Steven retrieved a bag's-worth of cotton candy for him to gulp down. However, before they could portal over to Keystone Steven's phone chimed.

_MaUn - 4:45pm | Heading to Crossroads for dinner. Want to leave in the next half hour if possible. Will you be home by then?_

Steven considered telling his mom 'no' and going to the water park immediately but he hesitated. He'd spent hours at The Festival and there was no reason to think Hersheypark would be quick. Certainly not half an hour-quick. Accepting that his and Wolf's secret team's secret investigation would take more than a day, he texted back:

_StUn - 4:46pm | Yeah b home soon._

Then he added:

_StUn - 4:46pm | Bought cotton candy 4 friends. Want 2 drop it off @ hotel first. Want me 2 save some 4 u & dad?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The promo was drawn by BurdenKing and I love the retro cartoon aesthetic he went with. They look like they're off to go frolicking with Betty Boop... or to start a fight with Cuphead and Mugman.
> 
> I may have had a little too much fun thinking up Lovecraft-themed rides and food. A few unused entries to share as well:
> 
>   * Randolph Cobbler
>   * Nyarlatho-tapas
>   * The Sandwich Horror
>   * The square-shaped Merry-go-round of Tindalos, which has dogs instead of horses to ride
> 
> Anyway, if you have some ideas of your own, feel free to share 'em in the comments! [Lovecraft's bibliography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft_bibliography#Fiction) is a great source to tap for ideas.
> 
> Here's the episode bingo card, courtesy of BinaryGeek and other delightful theorists from the Connie Swap Discord, armed only with the episode promo, summary, and their own speculation. On a related note, bingo speculation/suggesting is open to all, not just the regulars on the CS Discord. If you want to get in on the fun, or want to join the ongoing theory discussions, feel free to drop by the Connie Swap Discord.  



	2. Early Day Two

Generally Connie's nightmares fell into two categories: super scary or slow dread. It was the difference between having a terrifying monster lunge at her from the shadows and the sickening knowledge that a terrifying monster was stalking her no matter how fast she ran or cunningly she evaded. This dream was the latter, Pyra trailing her with the promise of gravitic vengeance for being pulled from the Inverted Pyramid. And while that flavor of nightmare was scarier in aggregate, it was also one the sleeping Connie had gotten good at identifying.

Dreaming she was in Jasper’s room of the temple and that the bubbles containing Pink Diamond’s shards had been smashed open by a gravity attack, Connie was fleeing a leonine monster and a tangle of giant, pink limbs. But then Connie realized that it was impossible for Pyra to have gotten into the temple at all --the corrupted gem certainly didn’t have access and Peridot had been convinced it would shelter her when Pyra had attacked Beach City-- so Connie realized she was having a nightmare and woke up.

It was an hour before she'd normally wake, her blanket was only half on the bed --no doubt moved from her tossing and turning-- and her jaw ached from clenching it in her sleep. Blearily working her sore jaw, Connie reached up and tapped the noise-canceling device on her nightstand.

"-got a real good streak going, Dot," said Lapis and Connie immediately froze as finely-honed eavesdropping instincts engaged, the girl recognizing Lapis using her serious voice. "It feels like it's building to something, getting us out of that hole we've been hangin' out in for the last couple centuries. I don't want to eat that cake yet if it's not done baking and, wow, pick a metaphor and stick with it, Lazuli, geeze," she jokingly chided herself.

Slowly, very slowly, Connie sunk back into her covers, being careful not to rustle the sheets while keeping a keen ear open for more. She didn't have to wait long.

"But Lapis!" A pause, and then Mom said again in a quieter voice, "But Lapis, it's not a misuse of Hiddenite.” Connie’s eyes went wide at the fusion’s name, having just struck eavesdropping jackpot. “She's never been employed in combat and that line will remain uncrossed. I merely want to tear down and rebuild the porch and stairs to the Beach House, a task which Hiddenite could expedite immeasurably," hissed Peridot, her voice pleading.

A long second stretched out and then Lapis said, "Dot... It's not what our double diva would be doing that worries me. It's why she'd be doing it."

"You think restoring the structural integrity to our home's entrance is an undeserving endeavor?" answered Peridot accusingly.

There was a creak as someone, presumably Lapis, shifted position on the couch below. "'Course not. But we wouldn't be having this discussion a month ago, would we, Dot? If you still had your limb enhancers then you and your merry band of bots would already be halfway through renovations."

A sharp inhalation of breath from a different spot on the couch was proof the remark hit home.

Lapis continued. "Using Hiddenite to go all handyman? I'm fine with that. She'd probably find a way to make a hard hat and coveralls look chic. But using Hiddenite as an emotional crutch? That's exactly the sort of screwup I'd have jumped on a year ago which ought to be all the proof we need that we _really_ shouldn't do it."

"I- That is- But-" started Peridot, voice thick with emotion.

Connie hadn't thought it was possible to wail quietly, it seemed like a contradiction in terms, but a beat later that's exactly what her Mom did.

"La-a-apis!" she bawled ever so gently. "I'm so feckless now and it pains me to my core. Everything I do is mere triage: I spend hours fabricating crude tools to allow me to do something poorly that I could formerly accomplish flawlessly in the span of a minute. I have no respite, no haven, because the specter of my inadequacy is omnipresent. Directing my robonoids, operating my workbench, preparing a meal for Connie, even walking the length of a room is a sharp reminder of my paltry and diminished status!"

"Whoa, whoa, Dot, everyone knows that you're working your cute butt off trying to get used to things and we're all proud of-"

"I don't need pride, Lazuli," Peridot hissed forcefully. "My pride was torn from me and compacted into slag before my very eyes; I am acutely aware that pride and dignity became effectively unattainable for me from that point onward. No, what I need is a palliative, some succor however brief that I can cling to as I reenter the weary trek of ineffectiveness that is to be my existence now."

Connie's eyes were wide, her eyebrows trying to crawl off her forehead as she heard her mom's tirade.

To judge from Lapis' voice, her expression probably wasn't too different. "Whoa, I- Wow. Hehe, uh, tell me how you really feel, Periberry." Another creak from the couch. "Did something set this off, Dot? Because whatever that problem is, between me and Jasper, we can make whatever it is regret having ever existed if it'll help you feel better," offer Lapis with forced bravado.

There was a growl from Peridot's side of the couch, a frustration-from-the-back-of-the-throat noise that ended with her mom saying, "During the night the robonoids unlocked the holographic suite in Citrine's room."

_THEY DID?!_ and Connie had to cover her mouth with both hands to keep from blurting that out.

"And after sequestering the files Doug requested be sequestered, I attempted to gain access to the handship data crystal."

"And?" asked Lapis, audibly hesitant.

_"And?!_ And the crystal's mission data is locked behind that invading Peridot's personal authentication!"

Lapis' voice drooped, probably as the gem's shoulders did too. "Oh. Hmm, okay, I take it back. I don't think OJ or I could brute force that for you. We’re more of the ‘see trouble and shoot it’ school of troubleshooters, less the technical support kind."

"Precisely," barked Mom. "And that is what makes this so unique and- and _cutting_ an indictment of my abilities. Identifying and stealing that data crystal was my sole contribution to the warship debacle. Seeing the holographic suite unlocked to use it as a computational proxy for my absent limb enhancers and deciphering the mission data from the crystal? These were all things I and I alone could accomplish, without aid, without technological prosthetics, as all that should be needed were my few remaining assets: my intellect and my technical prowess. _And they were insufficient!"_

The silence that followed was heavy, already awkward and only intensifying as the quiet stretched out. It was enough that Connie was on the cusp of making a conspicuous yawn or some other noise of wakefulness just to shift the subject. However, before she ended her ruse, Lapis said in a quiet voice, "I don't think I ever told you this before, but I've always been a little jealous of you, Peri."

_What?_ thought Connie, surprised by both the statement and the seeming non sequitur.

"What?" said Peridot, clearly thrown too.

"It's true. Think about it, right now you're as pissed off and disappointed as you've ever been, right?" asked the blue gem.

A quiet second passed while, Connie assumed, Peridot looked bewildered at Lapis. The green gem eventually said, "That is a broadly correct assessment."

"Well, you get to _be_ pissed off and disappointed. To own it, live it, to be royally upset like you darn well should be." There was a shift from the couch below. "And believe me, you have every right to be; I'm with you one hundred percent on that."

"Okaaay," drawled out Mom in a confused tone. "Thank you... I think, though I fail to see how this relates to your thesis regarding jealousy."

"That's the thing, Dot: Jasper can't let herself off the mental leash unless she's in, like, an empty canyon or something. She might kill someone if she wasn't. Ditto for Skittles. And me? Cripes! The only place I can have a consequence-free tantrum is if I'm inside a bubble. Even the Moon has ice on it, after all. No, I have to spend every day as a bull tiptoeing through a china shop we call the Earth. I have to bury those really strong reactions under junk food and denial before I lose it and turn Delmarva into an archipelago. It's- I mean, there are things that help, you and Con-con being the biggest, but I can never just let the filters down like you can."

"I see," said Peridot in a tight voice.

The quiet stretched on and on, a dark sense of foreboding building in Connie as it did.

Finally Peridot broke the silence. "While I understand that your intentions here are benevolent-" and Connie had to wince at what she saw was coming, "-the fact that my _powerlessness_ holds a certain appeal to you is cold comfort indeed," her mom's words dripping with reproach.

"Wait, I-" started Lapis but Peridot bulled forward.

"Yes, my rage is safe because it is _impotent_. I will not destroy the Beach House nor destabilize the continental shelf when I am driven beyond my means of self-restraint. Even wounding someone critically would be an accomplishment given my stature. Oh, what a dreadful state of being, to be overburdened with too much efficacy. Why, perhaps a parade is in order, celebrating your commendable restraint. Jasper can have a commensurately smaller celebration as well, recognition for not rampaging unchecked across populated areas."

A beat and then Lapis gave a low whistle. “Wow… that was- I’m pretty sure even Skittles would have felt _that_ burn,” and her tone wasn’t insincere or joking, either; she seemed genuinely shocked… and a little impressed.

A bitter silence followed before, her voice a little less vitriolic but still acerbic, Peridot said, "Upon reflection I see now that this is a uniquely Era-divided conversation to have. It is akin to a drowning human complaining to one dying of thirst: each has valid complaints despite the harsh irony. I- I appreciate the motive behind the message even as I find the message itself much less palatable." A beat. "Likewise for your objection to forming Hiddenite."

"Dot-"

That was the time to play the waking up card if ever there was one. With an exaggerated yawn, Connie stirred in bed, the conversation below going quiet in an instant. Rising unsteadily to her feet, Connie made a production of rubbing sleep from her eyes and staggering blearily down the loft stairs. Pausing at the bottom steps she looked at her mom and Lapis and, feigning nonchalance, said, "Good morning."

Lapis' expression was a touch skeptical but her mom sprung from the couch and hobbled over. "Good morning, dearest." The time flickered across the back of lenses. "You awoke earlier than is routine. Was- Did something happen to wake you?" she asked with poorly-concealed nervousness.

Yawning again, Connie shrugged. "Just a bad dream," she said, which had the advantage of being true. With a brief hug to her mom and then Lapis, Connie walked to the bathroom, eager to let hygiene act as a mental buffer between what she'd overheard and her day.

She made a point of not listening to the murmurs audible through the bathroom door as she brushed her teeth and got ready for the day, and by the time she emerged she found Lapis sitting a tad sullenly at her window seat while Peridot ushered the robonoid troupe out of the temple, each laden with assorted carpentry tools and supplies.

"Oh, are the robonoids not doing their codebreaking thing for Mother's holodeck?" asked the girl, sensing a natural opening for her to ask the real question burning in her mind.

Mom paused in tutting over the robonoids milling about to give an expansive sigh. She looked like she wanted to make some kind of accompanying gesture but her hands were full with the large controller she used these days to direct the robonoids, the boxy contraption seeming almost comical in her small hands. "The holographic suite has been unlocked, dear, but- Well, I think it most expedient to say that I will not be needing it for my purposes today so you are free to explore it if you are so inclined."

_Oh, _I'm_ inclined,_ she thought loudly. But what she said was, "Oh, alright."

Pressing on, Mom said, "My intention is to begin rebuilding the damaged parts of the Beach House exterior with such assets as are available to me-" and Lapis did an almost perfect job hiding her flinch across the room, "-but I can spare a few minutes to help familiarize you with the holographic suite's access and controls."

Connie swallowed, not literally hungry for what might be on that holodeck but it was a near thing. "Yeah, um, I'd appreciate that."

At that moment there was a chime and Jasper stepped off the warp pad. She paused, taking in the scene. "Repairs?" was her one-word question.

Twiddling the joysticks on her controller, Peridot got the robonoids to form an approximation of a line. "Yes, I-" the technician paused, looking at Jasper with a strange cast to her features. 

"Jasper?” she asked slowly. “Would you be amenable to the idea of Tiger's Eye working to tear away the damaged sections of the Beach House exterior so as to more swiftly effect repairs?"

Lapis looked up from her manga, lips pursed like a comment was on the verge of tumbling out. Peridot gave her a pointed look before turning back to Jasper.

The Quartz watched this with seeming indifference. With a casual shrug she said in a gravelly tone, "Sure."

Peridot's squeal was the exact opposite: gleeful, giddy, and piercing. She even hopped in excitement before landing and nearly unbalancing herself.

"Excellent!" she exclaimed. "Here, Connie dear, come this way. Let me get you acquainted with the holographic suite controls before we commence. Actually, Jasper, if you would, please gather building materials from- No, wait! We can go as Tiger's Eye and gather all we could possibly need in a single trip," and she gave another squee as she all but force marched Connie into her mother's room of the temple.

* * *

Steven frowned at his phone as it went to Connie's voicemail.

They'd talked on the phone some yesterday but then Sadie, who Steven suspected was using board games with Peedee and Jeff as a way to hide from her mom, had been revealed as the traitor in their game of _Shadows over Camelot_ and the conversation had been cut short by all the shouting followed by Sadie brandishing a bag of cotton candy like a sword and delivering a really good, villainous monologue.

Sadie said you practiced a lot of monologuing in your head when you worked a service job and Peedee had gasped and said, "Wait, you too?!"

Back in the present, his mom helped tie a scarf properly around Steven’s neck and asked, "No answer?" while nodding toward his phone.

Steven shook his head. "Maybe she's helping Miss Peridot in the temple; there's no reception in there since it's kind of like that phone booth in _Dr. Who_."

Just then the bus jiggled a little as Wolf, who was waiting for him outside, used the side of the tour bus/old-family-home/new-family-home-while-their-house-got-fixed-up as a convenient surface to scratch an itch on his shoulder. Dad gave a sleepy cheer from the back, exclaiming, "I thought dogs were supposed to detect earthquakes, not cause them."

Mom rolled her eyes and groaned just loud enough for Dad to know his humor had been appreciated, then turned back to making a pass over Steven to ensure he was properly dressed for the chilly weather outside. She'd been more... mother-y lately and Steven had a feeling why so he let her do it without whining.

"So you're going to a park in Keystone?" she asked for the second time this morning.

Steven nodded. "Yeah. The woman who sold me all the cotton candy-"

"Yes," said Mom, her voice flat even if she was smiling at him. "Nine whole bags, if I remember right."

"I bought them for friends," objected Steven, which was mostly true so he only had a little of his 'oh-gosh-I'm-trying-to-lie' nervousness churning in his tummy.

Mom's smile deepened. "Yes, and it was a kind gesture. I'm sure they appreciated it, especially since they're all displaced in that hotel still."

Steven grinned in response. Money spent on candy was frowned on, but money spent on making other people happier was usually okay. That or Mom thought that buying stuff for his friends was Steven's version of Dad's 'owning two of everything' tendency... which might be kind of true, actually.

Shaking his head a little, Steven continued with, "Anyway, Marianna said there was this amusement park over in Keystone that was really cool so I thought Wolf and me would go check it out."

This was also true, though Steven was leaving out the part where it was a water park --a water park that was closed for the winter, in fact-- and that it was where he hoped to find more clues about Amethyst and P2’s location.

The ‘oh-gosh-I’m-trying-to-lie’ tummy rave got a little ravier just then.

"Alright, well, you have a good time, sweetie," said Mom after pulling him into a tight hug and both giving and receiving a kiss on the cheek. "Be sure to thank Wolf for taking you there and back, and remember that we're joining the mayor and all the other residents in Crossroads for that outing they have planned."

Apparently being evacuated meant that the mayor got to take everyone out to a buffet place that was right next to a movie theater, a movie theater that a lot of people were planning to visit after. The debate over which film he, Peedee, and Jeff were going to attend had been intense, with Connie saying she'd come see whatever 'so long as nothing gem-related keeps me from coming.'

"I have an alarm set on my phone in case I forget," assured Steven, hustling toward the front of the bus. "Love you, Mom!" Then, shouting down the length of the bus, he added, "Love you, Dad!" 

"Love you, sweetie," answered Mom.

"You too, Shtu-ball!" called Dad over the gurgles of the coffee machine.

Stepping outside, Steven gave Wolf's chin a scratch and said good morning to the repair crew that was working nearby, one of several helping restore the city. Some people were cleaning up the broken glass that was everywhere while another two were replacing windows, a truck full of windows of different sizes idling in the street. Since Dad regularly let the workers use his fancy coffee machine, one of those kinds with flavor pods you got to pick from, Steven had noticed several of the repair crews making a habit of working around their house first thing in the morning.

"Ready Wolf?" asked Steven as he climbed up the yellow dog's back.

Wolf panted in response and then, after Steven gave him a thumbs up, howled a portal open and lunged forward.

* * *

There were bored-looking police officers hanging out in a police car parked in front of the Hersheypark entrance, though they were looking less bored when they noticed Steven approaching. Wolf, happily sniffing out the handful of treats Steven had thrown out of sight of the police, was content to wait in hiding until called for... or until he ran out of snacks.

A dark-skinned man with a trim beard that mostly covered a scar on his cheek stepped out of the car and walked over. "Can I help you, son?" he asked, his voice a deep baritone. The little brass name tag pinned above his right breast pocket read 'L. Daley.'

Steven found a smile and said, "Hi. I'm Steven. I'm here on official Crystal Gem business to investigate the disturbance here," puffing his chest up a little and trying to look important. He already had his Crystal Gem membership card out to hand to the officer; his official Crystal Gem decoder ring he had in a pocket in case more convincing was needed.

Officer Daley offered Steven a level stare for a few seconds before wordlessly taking the card and scrutinizing it front and back. Still in silence he offered the card back to the teen. "Is that a student newspaper or something?"

Steven deflated. "That would have gotten me in in Beach City."

The man's head cocked slightly to the side, expression betraying nothing, something that struck Steven as very Jasper-like, actually. The walkie talkie speaker clipped to his shoulder garbled something Steven couldn't follow and the man gave a one-word answer of 'Copy' in return.

Just as Steven was about to go for the decoder ring long-shot play, Officer Daley said, "Vandals broke in here yesterday and turned on some of the pumps. We suspect they rode some of the rides, which is a very bad idea because now we have officers combing the surrounding area because we're worried someone might have died of hypothermia."

The officer leaned forward a little, his expression intense if not unkindly in another Jasper-like moment. "Be sure to put that in your paper, son. Vandalism is bad enough, but we really don't want kids freezing to death. There are better times and places for being stupid, capiche?"

Steven nodded, wide-eyed and speechless. Officer Daley somehow conveyed 'You can go now' with just his stare and Steven left.

The image of Jasper with a trim beard and a badge was now stuck in Steven's head and he wasn't sure it was ever going to get unstuck.

He returned to find Wolf rooting through the foliage, still intent on finding every last treat. The hound looked up and offered a snort in greeting before returning to his hunt.

"Okay Wolf," said Steven, offering a noggin scratch as he got closer. "We're going to have to do this your way."

Wolf found something and snapped it up in his mouth, crunching a _Yupper Pupper_-brand doggie treat (and breath freshener) contentedly. Then he turned and gave Steven a happy pant, crouching a little to make it easier for the teen to climb aboard.

* * *

They exited the portal into the water park going their usual breakneck speed, which was why it caught Steven and Wolf by surprise when, rather than screeching to a halt, they landed on ice and kept going just as fast, scenery blurring past them.

"Aaah! Steer into the turn!" cried Steven, reciting advice his mom had shouted to his dad in similar situations on the road. However, just as Wolf was starting to spin, the hound made a grunt and they slid to a halt with a spray of white, Steven having to cling to Wolf like a barnacle to keep from being hurled free.

Heart racing and more than a little dizzy, Steven wobbled a little, clutching his head. "Whoa, I- Uh, good driving, Wolf." Getting his bearings, Steven looked around and asked, "Wait, how did you stop? Can your nails grab ice like that?" Very finely shaved ice, like what a snow cone machine would make, was coating half of Steven's face as well as a swath of his winter clothes. He started to brush it off as best he could.

Wolf craned his head around to stare at Steven then to stare at the ground ahead of him, itself coated in that fine white powder of shaved ice. Wolf made a production of stepping out across the ice and powder, then retreating back a few steps to reveal the complete absence of paw prints.

"Oh right, you can do your mysterious Wolf thing," breathed Steven, feeling a little dumb for missing the so-mysterious-it-was-obvious solution. He brushed some more snow cone snow off his clothes and said, "Still, that's pretty neat. You could be, like, the Air Bud of hockey if you ever tried out for a team."

Wolf accepted this praise with an affable chuff then proceeded to scent the air and start padding toward the base of a tall water slide.

Steven considered dismounting but a glance showed that the ground was icy at least as often as it was dry and he certainly didn't have magical animal powers. Didn't Taṅka Ōnāy, Carella Serpenthelm's animal companion, have a trackless step ability too? Maybe Peedee's _Lutes and Loot_ game was less make-believe-y than they realized.

The water park was draped in ice: the slides glistened with ice, icicles hung off of just about everything close to any of the rides, and the ground was covered in patches of it... which made sense given it was a water park turned on in the middle of winter. There weren't any heavily accented vendors for Steven to question so he really hoped Wolf was able to sniff something out.

Batting a gate labeled 'Employees Only' open, Wolf padded past a water slide and over to a building decorated with assorted warning signs, a bunch of pipes running in and out of it. The door was open, a conspicuous hole scorched through it where the handle would have been, and when the wind shifted Steven had to clap his hands over his nose --"Blegh!"-- while Wolf retreated hastily until he wasn't downwind anymore.

It was as if someone had taken the smell of an over-chlorinated public pool and then concentrated it for use as the world's worst perfume. It left Steven's eyes watering and nose stinging and he could only sympathize at how bad it must have been for Wolf, who had fled to a shuttered corn dog stand and huffed deeply at the lingering smell of fryer oil to escape it.

After a minute of deep-fried recovery, Steven tried to puzzle this latest clue out. "So Amethyst and P2 came here yesterday, turned on the water, and rode the rides. But... but they must have done something wrong, or maybe something wasn't supposed to be turned on in the winter and it made a big chlorine stink in the pump room while P2 did her tech thing. So that means..." He chewed his lip and idly scratched Wolf's ears while he thought. "That means... that P2 or Amethyst are probably super stinky too!" he exclaimed.

Looking excitedly at his fellow secret team teammate, Steven asked, "Wolf! Can you follow their smell? I'm pretty sure they fly from place to place, but," he hazarded, "I think a skunk with a jetpack would still be something, like, smellable… right?"

Craning his neck around, Wolf gave him an almost insulted look, the doggy-equivalent of, 'You have to ask?'

Steven thrust his arms up in triumph. "Woo!" he exclaimed. "Secret team victory number two!"

* * *

Still in her pajamas but at least wearing socks and sneakers, Connie stood in front of the half of her mother's room that was the holodeck. Her mom had given her a hurried explanation of how to access it, made her promise to take regular food and drink breaks since holographic foodstuff vanished once consumed, and then excitedly half-ran, half-scampered back out into the Beach House.

With an act of will similar to opening the temple door, Connie reached out with an indescribable sense and felt the room _respond._ A constellation of ideas flickered through her mind, a file tree made of lights that she navigated by thought.

Were the images that were appearing in her mind being beamed over from her gemstone? Was that a false dichotomy and her mind was a gestalt with her stone? These were larger, more existential questions than she usually faced navigating a file structure and she banished them from her mind with a headshake. Whatever. Powers were weird and all of that could wait. 

It could wait because in her mind's eye she could see images that, through some under-explained magic, she knew were contained in a collection labeled _Message for Connie._

Focusing on the first image in the collection, Connie's gemstone flared briefly with light, light the yellow crystals jutting out of the ground and walls flared to match, the air in the holodeck shimmered like a heat mirage, and then...

Citrine; Mother, because the title of 'Mom' had been given to another; the leader of the Crystal Gems and savior of Earth. However she was known, the woman who had looked over the Beach House interior from her portrait stood in front of Connie and was looking directly at her. 

She was visibly pregnant but otherwise identical to the woman Connie had seen, and wondered about, nearly every single day of her life.

"My dear Connie," and the sound of her voice was simultaneously unfamiliar and the most _right_ thing Connie had ever heard. "Hello." Her mother gave a smile under sad eyes. "You and I can never meet but it is my hope that this message- If you see this message then it means you have discovered the clue in Victory's vista and-" She stopped and mopped her eyes with a large, yellow hand. "I'm sorry. I had this all planned out but it's more difficult than I expected."

She cleared her throat and raised her eyes back to Connie once more. "My dearest Connie. You and I can never meet but it is my hope that this mother from your message can..." she trailed off. "'Mother from your message?' Oh my. No, that won't do. That won't do at-" and the image dissolved into a formless shimmer.

Connie felt something damp and only realized when she touched her face that she'd teared up. Mopping her eyes with a small, brown hand, Connie focused on the second image.

A ripple and then, "My dear Connie." Citrine was looking at her, eyes sad but standing tall. "If you're seeing this message then I'm sorry. I'm sorry because it means you've-" She paused, blinking. "I'm sorry because that's a terrible way to greet your daughter from across an impossible divide."

A vertical force field appeared and Citrine leaned against it with one hand. Then Connie was treated to the sight of her mother --the legendary figure and (according to Jasper) the personification of victory itself-- bringing up her other hand to facepalm. Deeply.

Citrine gave a loud sigh, face still buried in her hand for a moment longer. Looking up once more, she said, "Connie, I love you. And if you're fortunate you'll have an easier way with words than me. And if you don't-" She shifted her weight, the field vanishing the moment she stopped leaning on it and a new one appearing under her as she sat down, still looking into Connie's eyes. "And if you don't then hopefully you can draw a measure of comfort from the fact that your mother somehow managed to hold the Rebellion together despite sometimes having the verbal grace of a cracked Carnelian."

The eye contact lingered for a beat longer and then image dissolved into a ripple in the air.

Connie summoned a force field of her own to sit on and willed the third image to play.

"My dearest Connie. Hi! It's me, your mother. Hello from that little rock in your chest! I know you see me every time you look in the mirror, but I can't-" She stopped abruptly and shook her head, immediately and deeply embarrassed at herself. It was an expression Connie knew _all too well._ The image dissolved.

A shimmer. "My dearest Connie. I love you and I can only imagine the beautiful woman you've become. We can never meet, you and I, but it is my hope that this message will help explain-" Her voice hitched. "Help explain why-" She covered her face and wept gently before the image dissolved.

Sitting on her force field, one hand having risen to her gemstone without her realizing it, Connie focused on the fifth image and watched and listened, her eyes sad but a small smile having spread across her face.


	3. Later Day Two

It was a good thing Wolf was basically a walking heater or, Steven was convinced, he'd be a curly-haired icicle by now, winter clothes or not. They'd been following the scent of the two gems for hours now, crossing a good chunk of Keystone and, he was pretty sure, getting close to the western-most edge of Delmarva. They'd gone through a lot of farmland earlier but now were going through a big forest.

That Wolf's super heat might or might not be because he somehow ran on trickster goop, or was part shadow trickster himself, was something Steven had written in the 'hopefully find out later' section of his Magical Destiny notes and tried not to think about too hard in the meantime.

Warmth now; Wolf-mysteries later.

Steven had tried calling Connie a time or two since leaving Hersheypark but each call had gone directly to voicemail. He chewed the inside of his cheek a little but kept his worries to himself.

Wolf was padding along, trying to get a good lock on the scent trail before howl-portaling them several miles in that direction and then sniffing around to find the trail again. It wasn’t how Steven thought tracking usually worked but they’d traveled across most of a state in a few hours while still on the trail, so he wasn’t going to question his magical teammate’s methods.

Wolf inhaled deeply, his chest swelling in anticipating of a howl before he suddenly stopped, head darting to the left while his ears did that radar dish thing as they zeroed in on some sound.

"Huh?" asked Steven, excitement and nervousness fluttering in his tummy. Had they found them? He'd been rehearsing his lines in case they got to talk, but he'd hoped to sneak up first and-

There was a rustling in the woods ahead and a high, woman's voice said, "-swear it's not normally like this."

Another voice, also a woman's but winded and not so high-pitched, answered, "I don't care-" Pant. "-if the Jersey Devil usually-" Pant. "-pitches the tents-" Pant. "-for you. I'm never going camping ever-" Pant. "-ever again."

"I've been doing this for years," pleaded the higher voice, "and this is the first time I've ever run into anything weirder than a-" A short woman, petite, with black hair pulled into a ponytail walked into view and froze. "-A giant yellow wolf!"

Decked out in rugged-looking hiking attire, the woman was wearing what might have been the largest hiking pack Steven had ever seen, the whole thing dwarfing her like if Miss Lapis tried carrying an upright bass (case and all) on her back. There was a hint of an accent that he guessed was Japanese or Korean, which matched her features.

Several paces behind her was a heavier woman wearing large glasses, fluffy chestnut hair covering her back like a mane, and dressed in what looked like layers of normal 'walking around town' clothes. _Lots_ of layers. Her hands were clutching the straps of her plain, green backpack and her pale face was flushed from exertion. "Weirder than a giant wolf?" Pant. "That's not much of a- Eep!"

Spying Wolf and Steven, the woman in layers hopped behind her petite friend, taking cover behind the silhouette of the latter's giant backpack. The smaller woman retreated a step, one hand reaching to her side and pulling off her belt one of those small pickaxe-things a climber could stab into rock or ice for extra grip. "Stay back!" she barked.

Steven offered a friendly smile and wave. "Hello! It's okay, we're not going to hurt you." He scrambled down from Wolf, patting the hound's flank and saying, "Wolf's really friendly, I promise.” A beat. “Though he can get kind of excited when there's pork products around. You aren't carrying any ham on you, are you?"

The petite camper shook her head, expression bewildered, the climber axe-thing lowering a little. "No. I'm vegetarian and Cassie's jerky got swiped by Bigfoot."

"You saw Amethyst?!" exclaimed Steven, a jolt of pure excitement coursing through him. Wolf, however, seemed a little crestfallen at the news of the pair's jerkylessness.

The woman with the chestnut hair peered around the giant hiking pack before ducking once more into hiding. "Nope! I'm not even leaving my apartment for the next month!" she wailed.

Fixing Steven and Wolf with a long stare, the petite camper slowly returned her climbing axe to her belt and said, "That's what the green one called Bigfoot. Amethyst. You know them?"

Steven nodded eagerly. "Yeah! They’re gems and they're on a mission and I'm on a mission to catch them so the Crystal Gems can stop them from completing their mission because they came to Earth on a big hand-spaceship to do something bad and here, I have a membership card and a decoder ring and everything!" Pulling those very items from his pocket, he jogged over, face lit up. "I'm Steven, by the way!" and he thrust out his hand at the even more bewildered camper.

Wolf, meanwhile, paced in a tight circle three times and then flopped down. Head resting on his paws, he was apparently content to watch and rest since it had been established there were no snacks worth the name to be had.

Slowly, cautiously, the woman reached out and took the mitten'd hand offered her, though she passed on inspecting his membership card. "Anita," she said. Nodding her head over her shoulder, she added, "And that's my girlfriend, Cassie."

"Until we're back to somewhere with central heating, I'm changing our status to 'It's complicated,'" remarked Cassie.

Steven's expression grew thoughtful. "Are you two okay? We're a long way away from, well, anywhere. I think." He scratched the back of his neck as he tried to visualize where they were; his map app was spotty given the poor reception out here and howl-portaling made it even trickier to mentally keep track of their location. He shrugged. "Wolf can warp you home if you need it, can't you, boy?"

Wolf answered with a noncommittal snort.

Anita gave Steven another searching look --he'd been getting a lot of those on this mission, actually-- and then shook her head. "Thanks but no thanks. The jeep is only another four miles from here," an announcement which was met with a moan from Cassie.

"Oh, okay." Steven nodded. "So, um, you met Amethyst and P2? Oh, though she doesn't call herself that, she probably calls herself Peridot."

"Yeah. Cassie and me were camped south-west of here," explained Anita, shifting her weight from foot-to-foot. "We'd spent the morning hiking out to this pretty crystal thing and we came back to find purple Bigfoot digging through our stuff and talking to some green robot lady."

Cassie, meanwhile, had apparently gotten bored with being scared and emerged from hiding, standing a little behind and to the side of her shorter, woodsier girlfriend.

"Pretty crystal thing?" asked Steven, intrigued.

This caused Cassie to perk up in a non-frightened way, a first in the short time since Steven had met her. The woman slipped her pack off one shoulder, swung it around to her side, and began rummaging through it. "Yeah. It's this big, faceted slab made out of pure crystal. I know we're supposed to leave those relics alone, but they're just so fascinating and Anita had-"

Her sentence was cut off when Steven cooed at the charcoal drawing she'd unearthed from her pack. "Whoooa!" breathed the teen, gawking at the art. "That's a really good drawing of a warp pad!" Taking the art journal, he flipped through a few other pages, several showing a warp pad in a forest while others showed other gem structures, some familiar, others not.

Cassie blinked and then said, "Wait, you know what that is? How?!"

Anita, a small smile having risen to her face, leaned in and said, "Earth to Cassie: he showed up on a giant yellow wolf and is chasing the colorful weirdos who crashed our camp earlier. If we're muggles then he probably works for the Ministry of Magic."

Steven was about to say something in response when he paused, mouth agape. _This must be how Connie feels_ all _the time_, he realized, rocked by the revelation. _No wonder she gets more shy outside of Beach City._

Wanting to focus back on the mission, Steven shook his head and tried to get his thoughts in order. Handing the journal back to Cassie, he asked, "Did either of the gems say where they were going?"

Cassie was looking between her warp pad drawing and Steven, as if there would be more answers written across his forehead. Anita, however, said, "Bigf- I mean Amethyst was talking about a really big bridge they were going visit. The other one-"

"Peridot," offered Steven.

"Yeah, her. She asked me if they were getting close but Sasquatch was stealing my stuff so I didn't really answer, and Cassie was too busy trying to climb a tree."

"It's what I'd do when the neighbor's dog chased me!" objected Cassie.

Anita turned to face her girlfriend. "Cas, they weren't dogs."

_"I grew up in Pittsburgh! I don't do nature!"_ shouted Cassie, arms thrust wide in exasperation.

The petite camper shook her head good-naturedly then said to Steven, "Anyway, Peridot told Amethyst that they had a schedule to keep so they left the way we came after Amethyst swiped half our food and most of my climbing gear."

"What about the crystals?" said Cassie.

"Crystals?" asked Anita and Steven over one another.

Cassie, who had just stowed her art journal in her pack, pulled it back out and flipped to one of the drawings of the warp pad. "Peridot was hovering that big, green ball thing with a tractor beam or something. It was full of a bunch of crystal pieces, little chunks made of the same thing as this, uh, warp slab."

"Warp pad," corrected Steven.

"That," and she pointed his way while looking at Anita.

The woman with the implausibly large pack frowned. "Huh. I guess I didn't notice what was in that ball… thing. All I could think about was how pissed I was that Bigfoot had stolen my new crampons."

"Why did you bring climbing equipment anyway?" asked Cassie. "This was an overnight hiking trip, miles away from any mountains."

"I like to be prepared," insisted the petite woman in warm-looking flannel.

"Wait, Peridot is gathering warp pad fragments?" asked Steven. "And they were headed toward the one you two visited this morning?"

The campers paused in their bickering to look his way, Anita saying, "Uh, it looked that way."

Jolting like he'd been shocked, Steven sprinted for Wolf, the hound raising his head sleepily as he ran over. "Wolf! Can you portal us to that warp pad?"

Wolf gave a nod and panted a little in agreement.

"Then we've gotta hurry! We might be able to catch them or something!" and he all but flung himself onto the hound's back.

With a yawn and stretch, Wolf rose, looking around and scenting the air. Meanwhile, Cassie and Anita had drawn closer together, Anita's hand drifting back toward her climbing axe.

Noticing this, Steven said, "Thanks for your help! I'm sorry Amethyst stole your stuff, but she does that to pretty much everyone. I hope you have a good rest of your trip and your art is really pretty, Cassie!"

A tad meekly, Cassie said, "Th-Thanks," while Anita waved goodbye.

Then there was a howl and the world became a blur of motion and before he knew it, he and Wolf were sliding to a halt in a clearing, a warp pad catching the wan winter sunlight.

While Wolf snuffled over all the surfaces in the area, Steven hopped down and peered at the crystal, noticing a chunk the size of a small birthday cake slice that had been carved free. The sides of the cut were smooth and Steven couldn't see any broken crystal bits on the ground, so P2 had done a really good job cutting the piece out. He looked around for other clues but, other than an empty bag of Chaaaps, he didn't find anything.

Catching the scent, Wolf pointed like a trained bird dog, making a small bark to get Steven's attention. Hurriedly, Steven clambered onto his back and the pair set out once more.

* * *

Just over an hour later, Wolf lost the scent and even when he backtracked and found it again, it just kind of… stopped. They were just past the Delmarva border over in West Virginia (which Steven always thought was the most weirdly-named state since there wasn't an East Virginia or any other Virginia for it to be west of).

Half-an-hour after that Steven's phone alarm went off and they had to call off the search for the day.

* * *

Citrine offered Connie a wan smile before continuing her tale. "There is an expression of Jasper's that I think is appropriate, that Diamonds do not have dalliances with lesser gems. Though Rose was no Diamond, I was definitely her lesser. I would have tainted Rose if we fused and even though my refusal saddened her, it was, I'm convinced, the righteous thing to do." Her gaze moved into the middle distance and she paused, gathering her thoughts.

Connie couldn't help but notice that her mother was more visibly pregnant than she'd been in earlier videos.

Looking at Connie directly once more, she said, "Rose wasn't the only one of us capable of healing but for her it flowed easily, naturally. For me, it is a learned skill and one I have learned poorly because it seems my kindness is so often paired with a measure of hurt. Your father has an inherent goodness to him, a grace to the act of helping another that I think I lack and I hope that you take after him. In- In many ways, actually. I-"

Citrine slumped shaking her head, silent. A minute passed and then she looked up, first at Connie and then at something over her head. "Hmm," she said thoughtfully. Then she rose and walked to the edge of the hologram and beyond, vanishing from sight though it still recorded the sound of her footfalls. The image soon dissolved into shimmers.

It was the last image. The collection _Message for Connie_ had just over four hours of footage across countless holographic videos. This was Connie's second pass through, a few empty plates and half-drunk beverages sitting next to the temple door to show Connie had listened to her mom's advice despite it all.

Connie stared at the space her mother had occupied before she'd walked out of frame. With a thoughtful expression, Connie rose from the chair she'd dragged in and stood where her mother had been standing. She turned and looked across the room, the same room her mother had been in when she'd recorded that. She saw... wall. A few crystals. The edge of the colorful couch of pillows.

With a self-deprecating shake of her head, Connie willed the video to play again. "Room: skip to the second-to-last minute," she said. She wasn't sure if she needed to speak to use the precise control but it certainly seemed to help; her attempts at doing the same wordlessly were about as successful as using a keyboard and mouse while wearing boxing gloves.

"-that you take after him. In- In many ways, actually. I-" Citrine slumped and then, a minute later, looked up, first where Connie would have been sitting and then-

"Room: pause."

Connie summoned a horizontal force field that was just high enough that when she stood on it her eyes were level with her mother's. Following her gaze she saw... the shelf holding her Colored Perception diaries.

Her mother had labored long and hard on the message for her daughter. Weeks, probably even months if the progression of her pregnancy was any guide. And when her mother had found words to be a clumsy tool, she had decided to write it down instead. That was why there had been a journal rather than an access code waiting for Connie in the Archive.

Scooching over, Connie wrapped her arms around the paused image of her mother, the hologram every bit as tangible as the woman herself must have been.

"I know how you feel," admitted the girl.

A minute later Connie climbed down and sat back in her chair. In her mind's eye she went back to the start of the collection, the first image. _Just a few more before bed,_ she thought, knowing deep down the lie she was telling herself, that there was no way she was going to sleep before she finished a third pass.

The air shimmered.

"My dear Connie. Hello." Her mother gave a smile under sad eyes. "You and I can never meet but it is my hope that this message- If you see this message then it means you have discovered the clue in Victory's vista and-" She stopped and mopped her eyes with a large, yellow hand. "I'm sorry. I had this all planned out but it's more difficult than I expected..."

* * *

Most of the displaced Beach City residents were filtering back into the hotel, their dinner and moviegoing concluded. Steven had gone to dinner (shamelessly exploiting the buffet to sneak oodles of food out to Wolf in the alley behind the restaurant; he'd earned it today) and even attended the movie with Jeff and Peedee. Still, wiped out from the busy day he'd had, he'd nodded off pretty early into the film, Jeff giving up on elbowing him awake midway through.

He'd called Connie beforehand but she hadn't answered.

He’d even called the Beach House landline just to be sure and it just ran until he hung up, though Dad had calmed him down when he'd started to freak out about missing yet another attack. Apparently Lapis had spent part of the day helping the work crews and she hadn't seem worried, and there was that giant woman that Jasper and Peridot made who was doing something not-fighty outside the house, so it couldn't be that bad.

His nap aside, the mystery of Amethyst and P2's trip was gnawing at him. He'd thought about it over dinner, he'd thought about it during the waking parts of the film, and he was thinking about it now as he waved goodbye to Jeff and Dr. Brooks and was now walking Peedee back to his family's suite in the hotel.

Something tickled the back of Steven's mind as he and Peedee walked mostly silently through the halls: Steven because he was distracted, Peedee because he wasn't that talkative, especially without Jeff around.

"Hey Peedee?"

"Yeah?"

"I didn't see Ronaldo at the movies. What's he up to?" asked Steven.

Peedee was going from pocket to pocket looking for the little card that would let him into the suite. It wasn't until he tried the liner pocket inside his jacket that he found it, the door making a little 'beep' as it unlocked. "He's... staying busy," he said a touch hesitantly.

A rested, not-distracted Steven might have tried to unpack that and maybe offered his friend some support, but what the tired, distracted Steven did was ask, "Is he here in the hotel?"

Peedee nodded, his mouth a line.

They stepped inside and could hear Mr. Fryman talking in a room off to the side, his de facto office while they were out of Beach City. Apparently he was using the enforced downtime to solicit bids from other suppliers for all the various things needed for the fry shop, a task that, according to Peedee, he'd been putting off for years.

Peedee stuffed the room key into his pant pocket then tossed his jacket on a foot rest. "He's in the bedroom on the other side of the shared bathroom. Hang on and I can let him know you're here."

Steven's blonde friend went into the bathroom and gave a complicated knock on the opposite door. This was followed by some kind of passphrase and then the door opening a crack so Ronaldo, the light reflecting off his glasses so that his eyes were hidden, could say, "Steven may enter."

Stepping out, Peedee paused beside Steven, frowned at the floor, then looked at him and said, "By the way, if Connie's aunts are able to let Ronaldo go do more of those warp trips, be sure to let us know. I think getting out and socializing and stuff was helping him."

Steven nodded, promising to raise the matter next time he saw Connie or the gems... which would hopefully be soon after he and Wolf cracked this case and were celebrated as doing their part to help protect the Earth!

The door to Ronaldo's room swung open as he approached, then shut right behind him. There was a stink of, among other smells, garlic, as Ronaldo had apparently warded his room against vampires as well as --to judge from the tin foil, horseshoes, and lines of salt-- mind-reading aliens, elves, and ghosts, respectively. Or maybe the salt was for witches. Both? Steven wasn't sure.

"Hi Ronaldo," said Steven, the garlic making his nose think it was dinner time again and his tummy reminding him that that was not an option after a buffet and a bucket of movie popcorn.

"Hello Steven," answered Ronaldo, sweeping past him to go hunch over a desk. "It's good to see you again. The assault by the Conspiracy may have destroyed my headquarters-"

The lighthouse had been mostly knocked over when the handship crashed, a fact which, according to Peedee, Ronaldo had not taken well.

"-But fortunately I kept offsite backups of the Truth for just such an eventuality," he finished.

Steven nodded. "That's good, I guess. So, I'm on a secret mission-"

"Aren't we all," sympathized Ronaldo.

"-and I've been gathering these clues that I think mean something but I'm having a hard time visualizing them," finished Steven around a yawn. "So I was wondering, do you have any U.S. maps and, like, thumb tacks, and maybe some yarn or twine to see if the clues lead somewhere?"

There was a beat of silence, then a second. Then Ronaldo switched on a lamp, revealing walls covered in pictures and articles, festooned with push pins and a spider web of colored string.

Ronaldo looked at him with a deep and satisfied smirk. "Yes, I believe I can be of assistance."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The unscheduled extra week of omake content between Ep36 and Ep37 meant a larger-than-average initial offering for the episode. I hope you enjoyed this opening trio of chapters and that you'll come back Wednesday, August 28th for the next exciting installment of _Injecting Some Fun!_
> 
> I've got some great omake content to share with ya, new fics posted between episodes:  
*) [Gravity Swap](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10673391/chapters/47717254) by br42 \- "P2 and Amethyst make a detour to visit this 'Mystery Shack' P2 is so curious about."
> 
> *) [Turquoise Haven](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10673391/chapters/47758807) by [Darkspirit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkspirit/pseuds/Darkspirit) \- "Finding herself squished between inadequacy and anxiety thanks to Rose’s shenanigans, Peridot looks for some comforting and relaxation. Maybe her blue companion can help her."
> 
> *) [Tales from the Rebellion: Frog Hunt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10673391/chapters/47969110) by [br42](http://archiveofourown.org/users/br42/pseuds/br42) \- "During the Rebellion, a Ruby is finding this romance business a lot harder than she'd expected. Fortunately Garnet is there to offer the burgeoning romantic a mission to find the answers. A mission... to find a frog!"
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you have a Connie Swap story burning in your soul that you want to see in our official, curated Omake collection, drop us a comment either in the Omake fic or here in the main fic and we'll get in touch.
> 
> Connie Swap has an official Discord for the fans. [Come check it out.](https://discord.gg/RQMDdhr)
> 
> As usual, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments and your asks at the [Connie Swap Tumblr](http://connieswap.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


	4. Day Three - Morning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a **friendly warning** that the latter half of this chapter might be uncomfortable if you're really squeamish about heights, or reading of characters dealing with the same.

A shudder shook the Beach House. Connie's eyes were open in an instant, the girl moving with practiced motions to snatch up the saber kept tucked beside her bed and spring to her feet.

The only problem was that Connie had been watching the holodeck until the early A.M.

Rather than pop up, armed and alert, Connie staggered, limbs leaden and heavy with lassitude, the girl nearly stumbling off her bed before finding her balance on the mattress.

Another shudder rumbled through the Beach House. When nothing attacked or even looked particularly out of place, a sting of embarrassment shot through Connie and the girl made a hasty sweep of the room to make sure no one had seen her sleepily flail about. Fortunately the Beach House was empty and her shame was self-serve only.

Wiping a bit of drool from the side of her face, Connie returned her bedside saber to its hiding place and stepped carefully down her loft stairs. As much as a part of her sorely wanted to just curl back up under the covers, she knew from experience that an adrenaline-fueled wake up like that meant she was up whether she wanted to be or not.

Maybe she could take a nap after lunch. If she was around, Lapis would probably join her, dozing on the couch or window seat in sleepy solidarity.

When Connie saw a giant brown-and-orange figure striding by the newly-rebuilt Beach House porch, the girl decided to put the usual washing up on hold, instead slipping on shoes and hastily bundling up in a winter coat and hat. Jasper and Peridot were fused again?

Even braced for it, the cold air sent goosebumps across Connie's arms and legs and Connie wrapped her arms tightly around herself, willing her body heat to warm up the coat faster. The damaged portions of the porch and stairs had been torn out yesterday by the colossal fusion while a gaggle of carpentry-equipped robonoids had done the rebuilding. The resulting structure was stable and safe to walk around on, but there were little irregularities visible as evidence that the work had been done by ten pint-sized builders of varying degrees of skill/functionality.

Tik-Tok had been put to other tasks since letting a sapient boulder work on an unstable structure carried obvious risks.

Leaning against a stretch of new railing, Connie watched Tiger's Eye stacking car-sized handship fragments like they were flagstones, the impact of a particularly large or dense piece the source of the semi-regular tremors. The huge fusion looked a little different from how Connie remembered her. The coloration on her arms no longer looked like she was wearing sleeves, two of her hands ended in gloves, and the star on her chest wasn't as pronounced as before. But the biggest change was her mane, which now ended just past her shoulders instead of cascading all the way down to her hips.

When the stack of pink fragments was probably the height of the Universe family bus and nearly as wide, Tiger's Eye bent down and hoisted it carefully, four hands ensuring a smooth and stable lift. Spotting Connie at the railing, Tiger's Eye smiled toothily, one hand coming free to wave. Connie waved back just before the fusion turned and walked away, taking her freight load of handship debris... somewhere. Out toward the edge of town, apparently.

Movement in her peripheral vision caught Connie's attention: one of the repair workers was loitering along the sandy trail between the Beach House and the boardwalk, gawking. _I guess it must look pretty eye-catching, especially for someone from out of town,_ conceded the girl.

Connie hustled inside to warm up and get dressed properly, her legs cold with only pajama pants and a long winter coat to shield them.

Dressed and waiting on the 'ka-chunk' of the toaster for breakfast, Connie was snacking on a banana from Mom's garden when Tiger's Eye returned. Gobbling down the rest of the fruit, Connie tossed the peel in the trash and scampered outside.

"Hi Tiger's Eye!" called the girl. She was excited but, given what she'd overhead the morning before, that excitement was laced with a measure of wariness.

The colossus walked over, the vibration of her steps traveling up the rebuilt deck and felt through the soles of Connie's shoes. "Hi kiddo-dearest," greeted Tiger's Eye with a fang-tipped smile, her last two words coming out in a rapid-fire tumble. She reached out and thumped the deck, the structure resonating with the impact. "Deck's solid again."

Connie nodded in agreement; since standing on the deck meant she was about shoulder-height with the fusion, she didn't have to crane her neck that far up to look her in the face. "Yeah, it seems like good work." She looked over at the shrinking pile of pink rubble. "Speaking of work, what are you doing with the handship remains?"

Tiger's Eye glanced over her shoulder. "Peridot wanted to move them away from the temple and thought I could do it fastest, given how large and strong I am," and the fusion treated Connie to the curious sight of a four-armed flex. "There's the abandoned quarry over there-" and she pointed in the direction she'd walked away last time, "-which is a good place to store the ruined warship. Besides," and Tiger's Eye leaned in eagerly, her huge face filling the whole of Connie's vision, "there's some very fascinating chert variations there. The quarrying revealed striations that are at least twenty-thousand years old, which is actually fairly young this far from a subduction zone so-"

Connie waved vigorously to get the fusion's attention, even having to hop up and down a few times before she could penetrate her geological enthusiasm. Finally wedging open a gap in the conversation, Connie asked, "Who wanted to move the handship pieces to Umbra's old quarry?"

All four of the fusion's eyes blinked, one after another in rapid succession. "Peridot did," she boomed uncertainly.

Connie's eyes went wide. "You said 'Peridot'! Quick, who went with me on the Inverted Pyramid mission?"

Tiger's Eye took a half-step back and cocked her head to the side. "Jasper did."

_"You said 'Jasper'!"_

Four eyes stared at two and then, "That's her name, squirt-dear."

"Don't you remember? On the mission to get the Earth Beetle, you called Jasper and Peridot 'I,'" announced Connie.

"Wouldn't that get confusing?" boomed the fusion.

"I- Yeah, it was kind of hard to follow at times," said the girl, the worry that she was in the process of committing some sort of fusion faux pas stealing her momentum. Was it rude to refer to a fusion's past idiosyncrasies?

A complicated shrug followed, given the number of limbs involved, and Tiger's Eye reached out to delicately pat Connie's head. "I am me and they are me and we are all together." A beat. "Coo coo ka choo," and Tiger's Eye's face split into a grin.

"Did-" Connie was finding words hard just then. "Did you just quote The Beatles at me?"

"Paraphrased," and two of four eyes winked. "Peridot remembered the song." Straightening up, the huge fusion said, "I'm going on patrol after I finish cleaning up the beach outside the temple. You have a good morning, dearest-kiddo." Stepping back from the porch, Tiger's Eye turned to the member of the repair crew who had been trying to look inconspicuous behind a crag this whole time. "Are you lost? You've strayed from Beach City proper."

The man started to retreat a step and then... passed out? He swooned, landing limply in the sand. A second later he groaned and clutched his head, bleary and confused. This turned into a cry of alarm as an enormous hand gently lifted him up and a toothy giant said, "Don't be scared. I will return you to your kind."

Fusion and wayward worker disappeared around the bend, the former talking about the erosion patterns visible in the cliff face, the latter probably rethinking whatever impulse drove him to gawk at Beach City's weirdest attraction.

Stepping back inside, Connie found her breakfast cooling in the toaster. Her stomach deciding that lukewarm toast now was better than hot toast later, she spread some butter on the bread, mixed some fruit, yogurt, and granola in a bowl, then drizzled honey over bowl and toast alike. She gave Bismuth's gemstone a nod hello, silently urging the smith to reform already, and sat down at the kitchen counter to eat.

Crunching on some granola, Connie pulled out her phone. There was a text from her dad saying that the cell phones for the gems should arrive in the mail soon, though he cautioned her that given the rebuilding effort, she should check if they'd been shipped to the mayor's office/RV if they didn't arrive at the Beach House in the next day or two.

She fired off a quick text back, realized she'd forgotten to grab a drink, and, grumbling a little, went and poured herself some OJ from the fridge. _What's the point of having magical powers if I can't just conjure breakfast or levitate stuff out of the kitchen?_ she groused, half-joking and half-serious.

Back on her bar stool, Connie looked down at her phone once more. She hesitated for a brief moment before she began typing.

_* CoMa - 08:07am | Good morning. Just saw Tiger's Eye. Want to hang out some today?_  
_* CoMa - 08:07am | The stairs and porch have been rebuilt so you don't have to get Wolf to howl you in or be warped inside anymore._

Looking around, Connie noticed that Wolf was conspicuously absent. She'd just kind of gotten used to it since he and Steven had been... going to amusement parks, apparently.

A minute passed while Connie split her attention between breakfast and looking at her phone for signs of a response. Finally she saw the three little dots indicating Steven was typing.

_* StUn - 8:09am | Tigers eye?! Whoa! Awesome. Pic? Glad the bh got fixed up._

Connie stirred the yogurt, trying for a more uniform honey-yogurt blending as she waited. A glance out the window showed Tiger's Eye leaving with another armful for the quarry. When it seemed like that was the end of Steven's text, she frowned and replied.

_* CoMa - 08:12am | Forgot to take pic. Will get another when Tiger's Eye is back from a short errand. Anyway, do you want to hang out? It doesn't have to be here, I just thought it'd be crowded in the bus and it's still early to go see Jeff and Peedee._

Her expression slowly soured as she waited, eyes locked on the phone exclusively, only a fraction of her attention spared for eating. An eternity later the ellipsis appeared besides Steven's name.

_* StUn - 8:16am | Yeah jeff says this is like summer break and he doesnt do mornings over summer_  
_* CoMa - 08:18am | Steven... Are you busy?_  
_* StUn - 8:19am | Yeees? Im sorry_  
_* CoMa - 08:20am | Another trip you and Wolf are taking?_  
_* StUn - 8:21am | I hope this will b the last. I just think its important and_

There was a pause, her Nokia RagnarTök bearing the weight of Connie's frown.

_* StUn - 8:23am | I promise we will hang out after today. Im close and i need 2 do this_

The granola was crunched with more force than was strictly needed and suddenly seemed a lot less appetizing. Still, Connie thought back to her call with Steven's mom the other day, how this was probably his way of processing things, and she swallowed heavily.

She started to type _'Another amusement park?'_, her finger hovering over the 'send' button but she huffed out a breath and held down the backspace key. She typed a new message instead.

_* CoMa - 08:24am | I hope you and Wolf have a good time. I miss you._  
_* StUn - 8:25am | Thanks. Were going 2 a park today. A big 1._  
_* StUn - 8:25am | I miss u 2. Will call u l8r <3_

Connie pushed her breakfast further down the counter away from her, suddenly not hungry anymore. She worried her lip and typed back:

_* CoMa - 8:25am | <3_

* * *

_* StUn - 8:25am | I miss u 2. Will call u l8r <3_  
_* CoMa - 8:25am | <3_

Steven's eyes lingered on the text for a moment before he swiped back over to the map program on his phone. He tried not to think about how crummy he was feeling just then and turned his attention first to the map on his phone and then to the one taped to the wall. In his chilly room of the house and using the supplies he'd gotten from Ronaldo, Steven marked out the locations he and Wolf had tracked Amethyst and P2.

There was a pin in Massachusetts where The Festival amusement park was located. Another was in Hershey, Keystone for Hersheypark. Several more were pushed in along the path he and Wolf had taken tracking the gems, with a two thumb tacks smooshed up close to each other showing where he'd met Anita and Cassie and the warp pad they'd talked about.

When Steven connected all of it with string, there was a line going down and to the left, Amethyst and P2 going mostly south-west. Anita said that Amethyst had said they were going to visit 'a really big bridge.' Tabbing over on his phone he looked at a picture of a huge bridge, apparently more than three thousand feet long, stretching to either side of pretty, forested hills over a river. It was the New River Gorge Bridge and when Steven pushed a pin into the map on his wall, he didn't need string to see that it made an almost perfect line with the other pins.

Snapping a picture of the map with his phone, Steven pocketed the device and shouldered his backpack. He'd told Connie that this would be the last day and he _really_ wanted to make that be true as he hustled down the stairs to where Wolf was waiting outside.

"Ready to go, boy?"

Wolf barked, wagging his large tail.

He brought up the picture of the bridge on his phone. "We want to go here." To help, he brought up the map of West Virginia, showing where it was deep inside a national park. "Can you do that, Wolf?"

Wolf licked his chops and nodded, panting happily. Steven climbed atop the hound, there was a howl, and they were off.

* * *

It wasn't exactly warm in the park, but it was warm_er_ so Steven shucked off a layer, stuffing it in his pack. He absently scratched Wolf's noggin as he gawked at the view before him: they were standing on a bluff not far from one side of the bridge, the whole river valley spread out before them. "Wooow," breathed the teen.

Wolf chuffed in agreement, leaning into the scratches.

There weren't any purple or green aliens visible on the bridge, at least not that Steven could see, but maybe they'd find clues. They'd been getting closer --Marianna had said the gems were at the amusement park two days before Steven asked her, Officer Daley had said the water park had been broken into the day before he and Wolf snooped around, and the gems had visited the warp pad near the campers earlier that day they'd howl-portaled over-- so Steven was really hopeful any clues would be fresh.

Wind blew in heavy gusts now and again over the bridge. Wolf would pause to snuffle the asphalt every so often, while Steven clung to him for stability. The view looked a lot less relaxing when he was standing on a bridge with short railings over a _reeeally_ long drop.

_Wolf could save me with a howl portal if I dropped,_ he told himself, clutching to yellow fur. _He could... right?_

It was at about the halfway point of the bridge that Wolf paused, snuffling right up to the edge, the drop to the river looking extra drop-y. He snorted, looked over at Steven, then looked over the edge again.

"You can smell them?"

Wolf raised a paw to about knee height and then lowered it back, which Steven took to mean 'maybe' in Wolfspeak. Then the hound looked over and back to Steven again.

"You want me to look for clues?!" he asked, trepidation clear in his voice.

Steven's attempt to interpret the hound's steady gaze came back with, 'It's not like I can climb down there. Paws, not hands.' He was unsure if Wolf was actually that snarky or not, but the fact remained: if anyone could get down there, it'd have to be him.

Struggling to swallow, Steven open and closed his mouth, nodding wordlessly. He'd brought rope in his bag, because that's one of the things adventurers carried with them, but... _He could save me with a howl portal if I dropped,_ Steven thought really loudly to himself.

A few minutes later, the rope was tied tightly around Steven's waist, the other end tied around Wolf's. Given the hound's weight, even someone as stocky as Steven wouldn't budge a Wolf that didn't want to move... something he and Connie had learned in the past when they'd wanted to go on an adventure and Wolf had been _really_ into his nap.

Stepping over the railing, Steven crawled to the lip of the bridge, his eyes wide as dinner plates as he gawked at the drop below. _Mission. Secret team. Crystal Gems. Connie,_ he thought to himself, trying to explain to the heebie-jeebies why he was doing this.

The heebie-jeebies remained skeptical.

"Y-" Steven swallowed, albeit with some difficulty. "You're ready?"

Wolf nodded, batting the rope tethering the pair with a paw to emphasize the point.

"O-Okay then," said Steven. _Mission. Secret team. Crystal Gems. Connie. Wolf can save me with a howl portal._ Still on his belly, he swiveled around so that he was approaching the edge feet-first. When his foot reached open air he had to pause for a full minute.

_Mission. Connie. Secret team. Crystal Gems. Connie. Wolf can save me with a howl portal._

Inching back, first his ankle and then his leg dropped off until he was dangling from his waist-down over an abyss. Kicking, he could just barely touch with the toe of his shoe the steel girders or beams or whatever they were called that were holding up the bridge, a lip of about eighteen inches between edge and everything beneath.

_Connie. Secret mission. Crystal Gems. Connie. Wolf can save me with a howl portal. Connie. I don't want to do this but I don't want to not do this worse!_

"Ahh-_ahhh!_" he said and then shouted as he dropped over the side, stopping with a shoulder-jarring jerk as he hung desperately to the bridge's lip. Since this was a bridge over a river, there was no need to look down to see that he was _really high up_ so he spent another couple seconds screaming.

That done, slowly, he paid out all the slack in the rope until it went taut. Then, with one sweaty hand and then another, he transferred his weight to the rope and _iiinched_ down, twisting in place as the wind buffeted him. Finally low enough, Steven kicked out with a foot and, on the fourth try, managed to hook a girder with his shoe. Giving himself a little more slack, Steven struggled, swinging out with one hand and managing to snag a hold. It was cold but he was sweating and his inner chant had been replaced with a wordless scream. Pulling himself closer, Steven managed to transfer his weight from rope to metal, clutching the underside of the bridge like a frightened baby koala.

He sat there for another minute, listening to the wind and the sound of his heart pounding in his ears.

_Connie skydived from space,_ a voice in his head reminded him. It sounded a little like Jasper did during training.

Opening one eye but still holding the girder with a white-knuckle grip, Steven looked around. There were old bird nests, empty in the winter. There were random pieces of wind-blown debris, bits of plastic that might have been decades old. And then, a few girders over, was graffiti.

Graffiti that was half in French and half in gem-script.

Spotting a fresh bit of plastic wedged into the girder beside the graffiti, Steven took a deep breath and, with all the speed of an apprehensive sloth, crawl-climbed over. There was an empty bag of trail mix and what looked like a chewed on sack of climber's chalk. Steven grabbed each and stuffed them in his pockets, hair whipping in the wind despite his shiny, red scrunchie.

He tried to memorize the graffiti but he was doubtful about the French and certain he was messing up the gem letter-thingies. So, oh-so-carefully, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and snapped a picture, the phrase _Don'tDropItDon'tDropItDon'tDropIt_ running loudly through his head.

Phone carefully pocketed once more, Steven shouted up. "Wolf. Wolf! I'm done. Bring me up! Please!"

He clung there wondering if he'd been heard, if this was going to be his life now as a bridge koala, when the slack in the rope started to disappear over the lip above.

When the slack was finally gone, Steven felt a slight tug. Taking a very deep breath, Steven did what was probably the scariest thing ever and... let go.

“Aaahhh!”

He swung and twisted and flailed a little but the rope held and he was raising steadily higher. He managed to grip the lip of the bridge and keep from bonking his head on it as he rose, half-climbing, half-being-dragged up over the railing and onto the asphalt. He clung onto the wonderfully solid, horizontal surface, radiating relief.

Wolf padded over and, gripping the back of Steven's jacket in his mouth, slowly hauled the teen further away from the edge.

Unmoving, still flat on his belly, Steven pulled the chalk bag from his pocket and thrust it up where Wolf sniffed it. Another couple seconds and Steven rose to a seated position, brushing bridge dirt off him and feeling icy-hot jolts of electricity as adrenaline continued to surge through him.

As Wolf scented the air and the bag, Steven pulled out his phone, called up the picture of the graffiti, and ran the French through an online translator.

_The Purple Thief was here._

Then he withdrew his gem decoder ring and, slowly, tried to decipher the gem-script.

_Peridot 2B2Y was here also._

Looking over, he saw Wolf's head snap in the direction of the opposite side of the bridge --pointed roughly south-west-- and his tail started wagging. Steven smiled, a surge of triumph warming him. "Let's go, boy!"

Then his legs turned into noodles when he tried to actually stand up and Steven laid there on his side instead. "Two more minutes," he mumbled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While planning the path P2 and Amethyst would take and Steven and Wolf would follow, I looked around for landmarks in the West Virginia-ish area and stumbled across the New River Gorge Bridge. While I've never been there myself, I will say it's gorgeous in photos and can absolutely see why Amethyst would want to bring P2 there along the way.  

> 
> That said, I certainly wouldn't want to clamber over the side of it, magical wolf helping me or not. There _are_ catwalks beneath the bridge but clearly Amethyst and P2 would not deign to sit anywhere so accessible. I imagine heights and general climbability matter a lot less when you can fly.
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you have a Connie Swap story burning in your soul that you want to see in our official, curated Omake collection, drop us a comment either in the Omake fic or here in the main fic and we'll get in touch.
> 
> Connie Swap has an official Discord for the fans. [Come check it out.](https://discord.gg/RQMDdhr)
> 
> As usual, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments and your asks at the [Connie Swap Tumblr](http://connieswap.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


	5. Day Three - Afternoon

Connie had walked into her mother's room but walked right back out when a wave of emotion rolled through her, an almost Pavlovian response to her nearly day-long exploration of the holodeck yesterday (and, technically, very early today). Apparently that was the sort of thing you had to pace yourself over.

That was why when Lapis returned, she found Connie hunkered down on the couch, reading through one of the _Hunger Games_ books that had been languishing in the girl's YA backlog for some time.

The heavy front door closed with a whump. "Sup, Con-con?" called the blue gem. Rather than wait for a reply, she skipped over to the kitchen counter, setting something heavy down beside Bismuth's gemstone before fussing with the tacky plastic tiara to ensure it was on the rainbow-hued stone properly.

Connie slid her bookmark into place and set her book down on the coffee table to see what was going on. "Nothing much," she answered, voice a little sour at the reminder of her current Stevenlessness. "Is anything interesting going on?" she asked, trying to keep the subject, and her mood, light.

The gem never took her eyes off her work. "Always. Ready to have your mind blown, girlie?" she said with audible relish.

Against Connie's will this drew a modest smile forth. "Lay it on me," she challenged.

"'Spam wads' looks the same written upside down and right-side up." The long-haired gem turned to look at Connie, raised a fist to her head, then spread her fingers out in a pantomimed explosion.

Connie paused midway to the counter. "Wait, really?" She envisioned the words and... She raised a fist to her head and mimed an explosion of her own.

Lapis winked and returned to her work.

Shaking her head, Connie finished walking over and saw the rainbow-painted star on the device Lapis had brought in. "You found Bismuth's Breaking Point?"

Lapis nodded. "Yup. Fished it out of the bay myself." A few seconds later and she seemed satisfied the tiara was in maximum 'embarrass Bismuth upon reforming' position. She flicked the gemstone, careful not to disturb the tiara, adding, "I got your gizmo, goober, so hurry up and reform." 

When Bismuth failed to spring back to being, the blue gem rolled her eyes, arms crossed. "Typical," she muttered. Turning back to Connie her expression softened and she said, "Why so glum, my sunny gem'd chum?"

Connie considered deflecting. She'd passed on talking with her dad about her and Steven, after all, but she'd felt less... like this when father and daughter had talked. Instead, she took Lapis by the hand and led her over to the couch, flopping down on the middle cushion while Lapis took her preferred spot lounging in the 'L' at the end.

"You know how Steven evacuated during the handship attack?"

Lapis nodded, attentive but her expression otherwise neutral.

"Things have been weird ever since then and-" Connie sighed. "I guess I thought things would have been worked out by now."

The blue gem sat up. "What'd he say last time it came up?"

Connie shrank in on herself a little. "It kind of... hasn't. I tried to bring it up once, but Steven had-" and she saw Bismuth and her Breaking Point in her peripheral vision, "-something else on his mind at the time."

"I realize this is rich coming from me, but have you thought about bringing it up with him again? For realsies? Curls can be a distracted little puppy sometimes, but if he knows it's serious, he should focus," and Lapis patted Connie's leg encouragingly at the end.

Connie's head only hung lower. "I- Well." She huffed. "The thing is, I don't think either of us really want to because... Lapis, would we have won if Steven had been there? Maybe if we'd formed Asmi; they made a real big difference at the doom chicken fight."

Lapis snickered then turned apologetic as soon as Connie shot her a shocked look. "Sorry, sorry," and she raised her hands in a placating gesture. "It's just that 'doom chicken' gets me every time I hear it." She passed a hand over her face, her expression going somber as she did. "Serious Lapis is serious. Okay, so... maybe? But also... maybe not."

Connie flopped back against the couch. "Yeah."

Lapis continued. "But if the two of you didn't save the world and then go out for pizza, well-" She paused. "Actually, can Asmi go all see-through?"

Connie shook her head. "No. Steven and I split when we try it while fused. Whatever weird magical effect is letting me and Steven fuse at all doesn't seem to be able to handle a human and a being made out of light."

The hydrokinetic nodded. "Makes sense, at least as much as any of that stuff does. But with that off the table, how we would have gotten Pinkie off that spaceship at the end would have been..." She fell silent, her gaze drifting out into the middle distance as she frowned slightly. "...Complicated," she finally said.

"And that assumes that Rose didn't do something worse to him!" said Connie louder than was strictly needed. "Homeworld isn't known for caring about those pesky organics that get in their way!"

"Point," conceded Lapis, lips pursed in thought. "Hey, is that why Stevie's been gone so much lately?"

Connie deflated once more. "Yeah. He's-" A sigh. "-Taking a break, I guess. Wolf and he have been going to amusement parks and stuff lately," and her voice was the epitome of glum.

When Lapis didn't answer for several seconds, Connie looked over to see the blue gem wringing her hands. Noticing the attention, the gem moved her hands to her knees and said, "You don't want to bring it up because you think you'll be setting off a big drama bomb even if you're right, right?"

Connie considered that for a second and then gave a small nod.

Lapis' eyes were sad as she offered a wan smile. "Yeah, I know how that goes." She slumped over next to Connie. "Being the voice of maturity sucks, ya know?"

Another nod from Connie, this one deeper.

"But someone's gotta do it," and Lapis' gaze had once more drifted into the middle distance. Blinking, she asked casually, "Um, have you seen Dot around?"

"Tiger's Eye went on patrol," reported the girl. "I haven't seen her or Jasper and Mo- Peridot individually since."

Lapis' slump deepened, gem and teenager now boneless on the couch, propped up only by each other.

"Jank," said one, the other nodding in agreement.

Finally Lapis grabbed the back of the couch and hauled herself upright. She tried to do the same for Connie but the girl made a point of being a limp noodle, her pout becoming a reluctant giggle as it turned into a game: Lapis attempting to get her upright and Connie trying to wriggle out and land bonelessly in her lap. The two tussled for a minute but then it escalated to tickling, with tickling earned in retaliation, and it ended by détente at the recognition of mutually assured tickle-destruction.

"I know we have to have that talk, Lapis," Connie begrudgingly acknowledged. "It's just scary. And with Steven avoiding me..." She lapsed into silence.

Lapis nodded. "I gotcha, girlie," and she pulled the girl into a hug. "Gotcha big time."

It was only because she'd be confessing to eavesdropping that Connie didn't offer some vague comfort regarding Lapis and Peridot, the subject the gem was obviously concerned over.

Separating, Lapis jabbed a thumb over her shoulder. "If she wakes up, be sure to snap a picture of BM with her headwear on while I'm out."

"You're leaving?" asked Connie, her voice a little pleading.

"Yeah, I gotta go patrolling with the G-squad. You know, buddy system and all."

Connie glanced at the time. "Did you two schedule something?"

Lapis gave a cavalier shrug. "Meh, she can peek at the future so the way I see it, I made an appointment just by showing up. But if Bigger Tigger is out there then it's a good time for it: all four of us trying to flush Rosy out of hiding."

Connie nodded, a little sad but not willing put her own issues above hunting down enemy invaders.

Seeing Connie's wan expression, Lapis said, "But I promise I'll be back tout suite. Then we can do something important like save the world from having too many nachos and unwatched cartoons."

The teen smiled back. "That'd be fun." Then her smile dimmed. "So you think Steven will be okay?" A beat. "With stuff?"

Lapis gave a relaxed smile and waved Connie off. "Pshaw. You and Stevie? You guys will be fine. Power couple, you two." She walked over to the warp pad. "Pinkie probably just needed to put all this gem business on hold for a couple of days before getting back to it. We've all been there."

Connie nodded. "That's true. I'll see you later, Lapis!"

"Bye Con-con!" Then, just before the beam of light engulfed her, she shouted, "Spam wads!" and was gone.

Heading back to the couch, Connie pulled open her novel to see what Katniss was going to do next, muttering, "Maybe he did just need to get away from gem stuff for a while."

* * *

Steven stared down the crackling ball of plasma pointed at him and gave a nervous smile, hands raised in surrender. "I come in peace," he said.

"Really?" asked P2, her blaster trained on him. "That seems foolish given the open conflict between our respective organizations. Though it does make capturing you all the easier, which I appreciate."

They were in the forest, not too far from the New River Gorge Bridge. He'd been walking alongside Wolf, closing in on the gems. The plan had been to find Amethyst and P2, then hurry out and get the Crystal Gems so they could return as a group so both sides could talk it out. But what had happened instead was Amethyst suddenly dropping down from the trees and tying Steven up with a purple whip, then shouting for P2. Somehow the car-sized Wolf had pulled a ninja trick and vanished, with Steven realizing that maybe he'd been walking by himself the last couple of yards through the forest.

"You're... welcome?" he said after a pause.

Calling past Steven, P2 said, "Amethyst, as a member of the warrior caste, how much of a threat do you think this Steven poses?"

The purple gem looked up from where she'd been rummaging through his cheeseburger backpack, having released Steven as soon as P2 joined them so as to better go through his stuff. Pulling the half-eaten bag of climbers chalk out of the pack, she exclaimed, "Oh, sweet! I thought I'd finished this."

"Amethyst?" pressed P2 patiently. She shot Steven a 'Quartzes, right?' look, her plasma blast still trained on him.

"Quoi? Oh, nah, Steven's cool. Had some real tasty pens on him when I first met him-"

"There's more between the tomato and cheese layers," called Steven.

Amethyst made a noise of excitement, followed a second later by a loud crunching sound and a swallow. "Ah yeah, I remember those." Wiping her mouth, which only served to further spread the ink around, she said, "And he wasn't a jerk like les Cons." Shaking her head, she finished by saying, "He's not a threat."

P2 nodded, pleased, a bright smile crossing her face. "Excellent. Then Steven, by the authority of the flawless Yellow Diamond and under threat of annihilation, I designate you a captive of Homeworld. You will provide me and my escort with intelligence regarding the Crystal Gems and not attempt to hinder our mission in any way. Is that understood?"

Going a little cross-eyed staring at the ball of plasma, Steven nodded his head distractedly.

To his relief the green scary-ball winked out. A few feet away Amethyst raised her head from the recesses of his backpack, his heavy winter jacket draped over her messily. "Bon. So... now what?"

P2 reached up with one of her floaty fingers and tapped her chin. "We've confiscated his gear-" gesturing to his partially-worn pack, "-and his communicator-" and she waggled a limb enhancer which had opened a slot earlier to swallow up his phone, "-so I'm unsure."

Silence reigned over the trio.

"Um, well," said Steven, slowly lowering one arm to his side while his other rubbed the back of his neck. "We're not that far from Beckley and I know a place in the mall there that does really good desserts."

P2 stared at him for a long second, Amethyst visibly excited in the background. "Very well. Your first task as our captive will be to lead us to these 'desserts.'"

* * *

Sitting in the food court of the Beckley mall, Amethyst demolished yet another cinnamon roll while Steven nibbled on his, keeping an eye out in case the purple gem tried to swipe his dessert. Again.

P2, meanwhile, had methodically unraveled hers, examining each layer of the pastry. But once she'd finished studying it, she'd eaten it with an almost Wolf-like abandon before immediately demanding another.

Steven had quickly learned that, unlike Miss Peridot's preference for sour treats, P2 apparently had a powerful sweet tooth.

When P2 was finally sated, a trio of floating fingers maneuvered a napkin across her messy mouth, cheeks, and chin as she looked around quizzically at the other mallgoers. "Captive Steven-"

"You-" and then Steven stopped to finish chewing and swallow, offering an apologetic look as he did. Dabbing himself with a napkin, he said, "You can just call me Steven."

"Very well," and P2 smiled at him, food bits being methodically scrubbed off her chin. "Steven, why are your fellow humans so indifferent to our presence? Don't they recognize us as interlopers?"

Steven smiled back. "Not really. Some people like to dress up weird when they go to the mall," and he pointed to a group of six gray 'trolls' clustered around a pair of tables. Not far from them a seventh talked to another shopper about Homestuck, her colorful red-and-orange horns bobbing as she spoke. "People probably assume you're cosplaying as something."

Looking down Steven noticed a sizable bite had been taken out of his cinnamon roll. Amethyst grinned at him, completely unashamed.

P2’s visor appeared, data streaming behind it as she blinked in confusion. Unlike Miss Peridot, she didn't always have hers on, summoning and unsummoning it as it was needed. "I thought those were a yet-unknown subspecies of Earth organic. You mean those are humans wearing... appearance modifiers?"

Steven chuckled. "Yeah. Wait, you really thought there were people with horns and grey skin on Earth?"

"It seemed less surprising than this strangely unmanaged chaos," defended P2. "That your primitive planet has even a semblance of civilization is startling given the lack of a proper organizational structure."

Steven shrugged. "It works pretty well, I think. Everyone just does what they want to as long as it isn't mean to other people. Besides, it's fun to get to dress up. You want to try it?" he invited.

P2 considered this as the floating fingers continued their tidying dance across her features. "Hmm, is there a way to experience it superficially? A demo of sorts? Novel experiences are fine, but we have a schedule to adhere to. Plus, this could be some elaborate ruse to enable your escape."

Steven raised his hands disarmingly. "No ruse, although speaking of, there's a makeup place nearby. We could get some rouge, maybe some eyeliner and see what you think of it?"

P2 followed where he pointed then pulled a face.

Sensing he was losing his audience, Steven was quick to say, "Or, I could take a picture of you with a silly filter on. You could look like a cat-" and Amethyst gave herself cat ears, "-or with big, silly anime eyes," and Amethyst turned herself kawaii, eyes large and mouth tiny.

"Hmm, yes," said P2, a floating finger rubbing her chin. "That would be an acceptable foray."

Steven flashed her a wide grin. "Great! I've got this great app on my phone and-"

"Ah, no, I'm afraid you cannot have your communicator back," chided P2, a finger hovering over to wag at him.

Steven chewed on the inside of his cheek for a beat before he said, "Well, I mean, I could let you use it instead. I can talk you through..." but he lapsed into silence as P2 shook her head.

"Negative," explained the technician. "Your device has geolocational capabilities and could be used to alert others to your position. It is only because I'm curious to study its contents that I have not thoroughly destroyed it."

Looking around, Steven said, "Well, uh, we passed a photo booth on our way to the food court. We could try that."

Before more could be said, one of P2's limb enhancers made a soft chime as the automated cleanup finished, prompting the green gem to rise to her feet. "We'll speak more shortly, Steven. Amethyst, please look after the ca- after Steven while I go and expel the foodstuff from my form."

Amethyst offered a sloppy salute before going back to her meal. Steven was about to ask when he saw the green gem turn and walk toward the bathrooms, the teen mouthing a silent 'Oooh.' 

While they waited, he let Amethyst finish off the rest of his cinnamon roll. He was about to reach for the bottle of water in his pack when he remembered all of that was hidden away in the forest on the edge of town, along with the rest of Amethyst's 'camper swag' and the gems’ escape pod. Instead, Amethyst escorted him to the water fountain and back, taking her guard job at least a little seriously.

P2 returned and smiled at them. She was about to say something when Amethyst interrupted. "Have a good puke, Peridude?"

"It was quite successful, thank you for asking."

"Wait, you barfed up the food?" Steven's expression was a mix of confusion and concern. "Did it make your tummy sick? Are you bulimic? Can gems have eating disorders?"

"I'm unfamiliar with some of your terminology," said P2 as the group got up from the table and began to weave toward the exit of the food court. "But to answer your implicit question, I lack a complete digestive tract, my mouth being my only relevant orifice."

Steven blinked. "But- Can't you shapeshift a, uh, working butt," and he was torn between blushing at the subject and snickering at it.

P2 shook her head. "Negative. Era-2 gems lack the ability to shapeshift, along with other Era-1 staple powers."

Amethyst shapeshifted herself a pair of horns and waved at the group of trolls as they walked past.

"Wait, really?" asked Steven. "But Miss Peridot- I mean, I guess I've never seen her shapeshift, not like Miss Lapis or Jasper or Bismuth, but I know she eats and doesn't need to, like, ralph it all up."

"I assume the misguided rebel Peridot gave herself the necessary physiology while reforming," explained P2. "You only need to glance at her to know she's been poofed before... though her choice of hairstyle isn't without its aesthetic merits."

"Yeah, I think it's pretty too," agreed Steven, letting the conversation lapse as the worked their way through a throng of shoppers.

They approached the photo booth he'd mentioned before, pictures of smiling, attractive teenagers doing goofy things decorating the outside of it. Several of the images had filters added to them, like a couple kissing with sparkly roses strewn about or a trio of girls hugging, a rainbow arching overhead and the letters 'BFFs!!!' visible underneath.

"This is what I was talking about," and Steven made a Vanna White pose along with a soft 'Tada!' Clearing his throat, he added, "What do you think?"

Amethyst disappeared through the curtain, the booth rocking a little as she called out, "Gimme dat rainbow!"

P2 scanned the device, looking at the data streaming across her visor. "Hmm, yes, I see nothing concerning here.” Looking past the data at Steven, she asked, "And this won't delay us unduly?"

Steven shook his head. "No, it's pretty quick." Sliding into the booth beside a boisterous Amethyst, he said, "Here, I'm just going to pay for it and then we can pick the extra stuff we want in our photos!"

P2 squeezed in, her and Amethyst doing something silly while Steven tried not to look nervous. There was an option for the photo booth to upload the pictures to your Instabrag account and Steven was hastily punching in his information, hoping that P2 didn't notice or think it was anything... sneaky. Steven didn't want to get disintegrated, but he thought it'd be especially bad if he was because he’d been trying to share something to social media.

"Amethyst, I know it's you who's grabbing my-" and P2's words were cut off with a cackle from the purple gem.

Steven leaned back, a fixed grin stuck to his face. "Alright, now we can pick our photo extras."

"Rainbow!" cried Amethyst, raising her arms and punching the ceiling of the booth.

Steven chuckled, the roller coaster in his tummy leveling out a little. "Alright. Rainbow for the first one. And for the next, how about some silly mustaches or cat whiskers? Here, take a look. Oh, but can I pick the third one? I have an idea."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Spam wads' is an [ambigram](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram), which means:
>
>> a word, art form or other symbolic representation whose elements retain meaning when viewed or interpreted from a different direction, perspective, or orientation.
> 
> Of course, neither Connie or Lapis would have any business knowing that word, so it went unused in the chapter. Amusingly enough, 'ambigram' is itself an ambigram if you write it right:  

> 
> Just one of those wonderfully weird little things writing this story has let me share.
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you have a Connie Swap story burning in your soul that you want to see in our official, curated Omake collection, drop us a comment either in the Omake fic or here in the main fic and we'll get in touch.
> 
> Connie Swap has an official Discord for the fans. [Come check it out.](https://discord.gg/RQMDdhr)
> 
> As usual, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments and your asks at the [Connie Swap Tumblr](http://connieswap.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


	6. Day Three - Evening

"Come ooon," wheedled Lapis, winging along.

Garnet's only answer was a flat stare that ran just long enough to be awkward. She did this while jogging across the forested landscape they were patrolling.

"Fine," huffed Lapis. "But you're officially a worse patrolling buddy than Jasper. _Jasper!_ Let that sink in, tri-clops."

They slowed when they came upon a small metal jug covered with assorted chemical warning labels. Lapis hovered down and prodded it with her mallet. "The heck is this?"

"It's an industrial deodorant," said Garnet in a conversational tone. "If someone or something was covered in something noxious, this would help neutralize the smell."

Shaking the jug, Lapis noticed it was mostly empty. Giving the warning labels another look, she said, "Well, if some human used this then they'd have worse things to worry about than toxic B.O." She looked around. "What the heck is it doing out here in the middle of... Where are we again?"

"West Virginia," answered Garnet. She hefted the container and resumed her jog, answering in response to Lapis' questioning stare, "Whoever used this shouldn't have left it here. It might be found by some organic."

The rest of the patrol went silently save for Lapis trying yet again to wheedle Rose-loyalist gossip out of the fusion.

When they reached the warp pad, Lapis said, "Well, you sub-Jasper snoozefest of a patrolling partner, since you never pick, I say we-"

"South-west," answered Garnet.

Lapis' eyebrows rose. "You want us to warp south-west?"

The fusion nodded.

Lapis' eyes narrowed. "Alright. Hop on, G-squad." As soon as the fusion reached the warp pad, Lapis initiated the warp and they were engulfed in a beam of light.

They appeared at the fountain grounds instead. Garnet turned and looked at Lapis wordlessly. 

The blue gem met her gaze for another long second before saying, "I thought maybe you were leading me into something."

"Maybe I knew you'd think that and go here instead," remarked Garnet before walking a few paces over and gingerly placing the jug in one of the restless, thorny bushes that littered the grounds.

Lapis put her hands on her hips. "Oh? You want me to call your bluff? Maybe I'll take us south-west right now."

Stepping back on the warp pad, Garnet's answering stare was unwavering, a dare delivered wordlessly. "Maybe you will."

Lapis waved her off. "Yeah, no, I'm not falling down that rabbit hole. Now, why’d you leave your jug here?"

Garnet didn't move. "It's safe. The local organics know better than to investigate these bushes," and one of the plants in question thrashed violently for a second before going still.

"I bet," the blue gem remarked. Initiating another warp, the two appeared at the Honeysuckle Battlefield, the omnipresent flowers here unbothered by the heavy snow.

"Not south-west," observed Garnet.

"Not even a little," drawled Lapis as she took to the air. "Now come on, slow-poke. I gotta finish this patrol soon so Connie and me can get our nacho on."

Garnet jogged after her. "There's no leading you anywhere."

"Nope!" answered Lapis, popping the 'p' and she flew a little loop-de-loop around one of the larger weapon handles jutting up out of the landscape.

* * *

\--To the South-West--

Steven stared at the warp pad P2 was cutting into with some kind of special crystal-cutting laser. He chewed his cheek, caught between hoping the Crystal Gems happened to warp over just then and worried about the same.

Of course, the odds of that happening were probably, like, a bajillion-to-one.

He'd seen Wolf once or twice since they'd left the mall, but only as a blink-and-you'd-miss-it glimpse of yellow. It meant the hound was following them and hadn't instead gone all Lassie to let everyone know Steven was in trouble. Wondering why, he'd started to suspect that his secret team teammate was still on-mission. _Speaking of..._

"My turn Miss other-Peridot. Why are you cutting a piece off the warp pad?" he asked. In the distance Amethyst was trying out the sloth form he'd told her about by napping upside down from a branch. He felt the urge to snap a picture of it but remembered he no longer had his phone anymore.

The birthday cake slice-sized piece of warp pad came free and was carefully levitated over toward the escape pod, the interior of which was glinting with dozens of other, identical pieces... plus a scattering of random stuff that were either souvenirs or things from Amethyst's storage caves.

"Firstly, I would prefer a different term of address," answered P2, giving the warp pad slice a final look, the dim light of evening made brighter with the glow shining off her gemstone. "Secondly, I am not willing to share my plan regarding these, as you are a dirty rebel collaborator."

Steven was about to object but, actually, he was still kind of messy from his bridge climb earlier.

"However, in the spirit of our game, I will say that the warp pads remain fully functional despite the piece removed," and she gingerly set the slice in the escape pod among the others. "A disabled warp pad would probably set off some kind of alert and warp crystals can operate despite a modest loss of mass. The cuts are precisely chosen to not disrupt warp operation, as I am exceptionally skilled in manipulating and sculpting crystalline structures." Preening slightly, P2 said, "It's why I was chosen for this mission, after all."

"What missi-" but Steven was interrupted.

"Question denied!" exclaimed P2 gleefully. "It is my turn to ask!" Then, speaking in a slightly more serious voice, she said, "What is the status of Rose Quartz and the Pearl in her service?"

Steven pursed his lips and thought. "I know that Rose and Pearl are on Earth and the gems don't know where they are. Rose met the gems for a truce talk but I guess it was a trap of some sort so Rose hid somewhere and they're still looking for her."

"You guess?" pressed P2.

Steven deflated a little. "I wasn't allowed to come."

P2 nodded. "Hmm, prudent. Although it seems unlike Rose Quartz to set only one trap. In my admittedly limited time working in proximity to her, she has been nothing if not shrewd."

Steven started to open his mouth when he stopped, then gave P2 a pointed look. The latter blinked in confusion before her expression lit up and she offered Steven a knowing wink. "Ah, yes. That was me implicitly asking a follow-up question. Well-caught, Steven. I must confess, your questions game is an unorthodox interrogation technique, but much more fun than the alternatives." Her limb enhancer cycled through several different weapon modes just then and she added, "Cleaner too."

Steven swallowed and tried to chase down his thoughts, which had been scattered like chickens just then. Mentally backtracking, he seized on something that would buy him time, and make talking with P2 easier. "I can call you whatever you want, it's just that I already know someone named Peridot and it's a little confusing since you have the same name."

There was a breeze and P2 turned to look directly into it, a small giggle coming as it blew across her face... or maybe her gemstone.

_Could gemstones be ticklish?_ he wondered. He knew Connie couldn’t feel anything through hers but maybe it was different for full gems.

Turning back to him, P2 said, "But we don't. The rebel Peridot is designated Peridot Facet-2F5L Cut-5XG, while I am Peridot Facet-2B2Y Cut-5XG."

"You both have the same cut?"

P2 smiled widely. "We do! It's rare, albeit not statistically implausible."

Unlike Miss Peridot, P2 was really friendly... if you ignored the 'dirty rebel' and implied torture remarks. _Okay, differently friendly,_ Steven amended.

"Well… Me and Connie have a different name we've been calling you since she first met you," he offered a little cautiously.

P2 looked at him curiously. "Oh?"

"Yeah, we've been calling you P2 because-"

P2 interrupted him, too excited to listen further. "Because my facet designation is 2B2Y, which not only contains the numeric '2' twice but also possesses the second and second-to-last letters of your alphabet!"

_Actually, it's because you're the second Peridot we've ever met,_ Steven did NOT say out loud. Instead he smiled and offered a kind of neutral not-an-agreement-but-not-a-disagreement like he used when he lost track of what they were talking about in class and was asked a question.

That seemed to be good enough for P2 because her grin widened and she exclaimed, "That's a facet, pun _definitely_ intended, of my designation I've always found noteworthy. That it was recognized by a primitive organic and the hybrid abomination he associates with means it is even moreso!" She beamed at him while he mentally added _primitive_ and _abomination_ to the 'differently friendly' list.

Then P2's expression fell. "Regardless, my name and designation must remain unchanged so we will have to find another term of address. Hmm, perhaps 'Loyal Peridot?' Oh! Or 'The Superior Peridot.' Hmm, yes, that’s a good one. Don’t you agree?" she inquired.

Steven cocked his head to the side. "But why can't you call yourself P2 if you want to?"

P2 gave him a kindly but condescending look. "Such a faux-name would not be tolerated in Homeworld space."

In the distance sloth-Amethyst had a particularly loud snore, each of them glancing her way. Then Steven said to P2, "You're not in Homeworld space, though."

P2's eyes went wide and her mouth slowly dropped open. "You're right! On a backwater planet in the thrall of a misguided rebellion, Homeworld norms wouldn't necessarily apply! I mean, certainly, roller coasters, cotton candy, water parks, cinnamon rolls, and photo booths wouldn't be available in Homeworld space either, but my primary reason for those indulgences was for Amethyst's sake. But this could be something entirely my own!" Rounding on Steven, she barked, "Captive! Address me!"

Steven jumped a little and in the distance slothmethyst snorted but failed to wake.

"Uh, hi P2?" said Steven, the sentence rising into a question at the end.

P2 half-giggled, half-cackled in satisfaction. "Yes, I like that quite a bit!"

Drowsing sloth aside, silence descended of the group. With a final chuckle, P2, now _really_ called P2, said, "That was very enjoyable, Steven. Thank you. Now, help me rouse Amethyst, as we need to depart."

Looking around for a long stick --according to P2, waking Amethyst was best done at a distance-- Steven asked, "Where are we going?"

Still tittering to herself, P2 said, "The Prime Kindergarten. Specifically, the control room thereof."

"And what-" but he was cut off by P2 sending a floating finger to waggle at him.

"Nuh-uh, Steven. Questioning out of turn is against the rules. Hmm, I need to think of an inquiry for you. But first, a branch. I’d use my tractor beam but the last time I did that, Amethyst...

Steven saw a glimpse of yellow in the distance and immediately ignored the rest of P2’s story, staring into the gloom until he saw Wolf peering out at him from a distant thicket. The hound gave him a questioning look and Steven somberly gave a small headshake, mouthing the word 'no.'

Wolf licked his chops in agreement and melted back into the shadows.

Their mission may have gone off the rails, but Steven was getting all sorts of details from P2: stuff about what she was doing, stuff about what she was capable of, even some stuff about Homeworld. If this kept on, Steven might even learn something important about Rose’s plans or location or something. That was worth sticking around for, especially since Wolf was trailing them.

“Amethyst!” shouted P2 excitedly, eight of her floating fingers cupped to either side of her mouth while two others poked the Quartz with a long stick. “Guess who has a new designation? Me! P2! Isn’t it wonderful?”

* * *

Night fallen, nachos long since eaten, Connie and Lapis were wrapped up in blankets, grooving from the waist up as the _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ outro music was playing. It was established family law within the Beach House that you had to groove while the avatar drums were playing.

Tiger's Eye had come and gone hours ago, back from one patrol and then out for another while Lapis had been out with Garnet; a confrontation delayed. Steven's mom had called midday to ask if Connie had heard from him. She hadn't and shared that Steven had mentioned going to a big park somewhere so maybe his phone wasn't getting great reception.

Just as Katara started to narrate the intro to the next episode, there was the sound of heavy feet stomping up the steps of the Beach House. Lapis paused the show and shared a puzzled glance with Connie. Their looks became ones of surprise when they saw Steven's mom briefly through the window as she approached the house and then _hammered_ on the door.

"Everything changed when the Mommaverse attacked," drawled Lapis, the gem helping Connie to her feet.

The pounding knock came again followed by a shouted, "Connie! Gems! Answer the door!"

Lapis pulled the heavy inner door open but left the screen door closed and latched. Connie peeked around the door frame while Lapis said, "Hey Mary. What's-"

_"Where's my son?!"_ bellowed the largest non-gem woman Connie had ever met.

Lapis retreated a step and then stopped, hands going to her hips. "Hey, if anything Stevie has been ditching us lately, so-"

With a growl Mary rattled the screen door and it was an open question if it would have stayed attached if it hadn't been rebuilt with Era-1 materials as reinforcements.

Connie pushed her way past Lapis, unlatching the door and saying, "Has something happened to Steven?" at the exact same time Mr. Universe, just now making it up the porch steps, rushed over and said, "Whoa, Starlight. Calm and collected, remember?"

Mary Universe stormed in as soon as the door was open, Connie backpedaling hurriedly to get out of her way. Greg Universe followed a little after, softly closing the doors behind him.

Rounding on Connie, her expression so fierce the girl shrank back, Mrs. Universe said, "Where is my son?! Why haven't you found him already?!"

Lapis came over, jaw set and arms crossed, but a glance from Connie kept the gem from responding. Instead, wetting the inside of her suddenly dry mouth, Connie asked, "Is Steven missing? Did something happen?"

Mrs. Universe gave another growl of frustration, this one morphing into a barked, "You didn't even know?!"

Lapis intervened, taking a half-step forward. "Look, lady. You can talk inside or you can yell at us while swimming for shore because, mother-of-the-groom or not-" 

"What?!" cried Connie.

"-this is just rude. No, we don't know a darned thing, so why don't you dial it down and share the details."

Taking his wife's arm, Mr. Universe shot the pair an apologetic (though haggard) look and explained, "We got a call from the Fryman boy earlier-"

"Peedee?" asked Connie, confused and hurt that something had happened... that something had happened that Peedee knew about before her... that something had happened and Peedee had called the Universes first!

Mr. Universe shook his head. "No. Roland? Ronald?"

"Ronaldo," ground out Mrs. Universe through clenched teeth.

"Yeah. Ronaldo called us. Said he saw something on Shtu-ball's Instabrag feed," finished Mr. Universe.

Before Connie could reach for her phone, Mrs. Universe had hers out and had thrust it brusquely in Connie's direction.

The girl took the phone and stared at the photo, eyes widening, jaw dropping as smoke billowed and gears ground to a halt inside Connie HQ. Lapis leaned in close beside her and had a similar reaction.

_"What the heck?!"_ shouted Connie.

Lapis shouted something too and, given the circumstances, absolutely no one scolded her for swearing in front of a minor. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The in-chapter art was drawn by BurdenKing. Kudos to him for getting that right combination of garish meets hidden message.
> 
> If anyone is so inclined, **I'd love** to see what y'all thought those other photo booth photos might've looked like. Probably a bit more 'silly filters' and a bit less 'visual message in a bottle.'
> 
> Tune in Wednesday, September 4th, for the next exciting installment of _Injecting Some Fun!_
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you have a Connie Swap story burning in your soul that you want to see in our official, curated Omake collection, drop us a comment either in the Omake fic or here in the main fic and we'll get in touch.
> 
> Connie Swap has an official Discord for the fans. [Come check it out.](https://discord.gg/RQMDdhr)
> 
> As usual, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments and your asks at the [Connie Swap Tumblr](http://connieswap.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


	7. Day Three - Night

After an initial round of (loud, angry) disbelief, Connie was pacing the room, brows furrowed, frowning into the the middle distance. "Okay, so Steven and Wolf are going to a park and they somehow run into P2 and Amethyst and Steven gets captured. That's..." she paused, looking at the others in the room. "That's really unlikely." 

She shook her head, dismissing the notion. "No, they must have known where to find Steven." Rounding on Lapis, she asked, "Does Rose have some sort of people-tracking magic? Do-" and her voice got quieter, some of the energy leaving her tone. "Do Pearls have a power like that?" Then her eyes went wide as she gasped. _"Garnet!_ She-"

Before Connie's theory/accusation could unfurl, Mr. Universe stepped forward, waving a phone in the air in front of the teen. "Hold on. There's another photo. Ronaldo pointed it out."

There was an almost palpable aura of maternal outrage emanating from Mrs. Universe and the effect redoubled with mention of this photo. The woman's fists clenched and Lapis, eyeing her surreptitiously, discreetly put a few more feet between them.

Mr. Universe squinted at his phone as he poked around on it. "No, not- Shoot, I accidentally clicked a link. How do I-"

Connie swiped the device, opened a fresh tab and asked with Jasper-like command, "What website?"

Steven's dad spent a beat surprised before he moved to hunch over Connie's shoulder, eyes on his phone held by lithe, brown fingers. "That Beach City Weird page. Yeah, that one. No, keep scrolling, past the thing where some TubeTube celebrities are supposedly magic beetles, no past the living island thing, wait, there."

Connie stared at the grainy photo of Amethyst and P2 riding a roller coaster, momentarily confused. Had they been preparing to abduct Steven and decided to ride some of the rides when they followed him into an amusement park?

She could maybe see Amethyst being that distractible but not her and P2 both. Besides, that was even more implausible and, wait, the date of this post was two days before Steven even went to that amusement park. Why had Steven even gone to that amusement park? As far as Connie was aware, he didn't even know who H.P. Lovecraft was, so it wasn't for the theme. Why go all the way to Massachusetts to-

Understanding dawned and you could tell from the way her expression shifted from puzzled to aghast to _thunderous_. _"He was tracking them?!"_ she bellowed.

"Yes," growled Mrs. Universe, strong arms crossed in front of her. "He was. There's a map with their path marked in his room. My son and your wolf have been secretly chasin' _alien invaders_ across five states _for days!"_

"Why would he do that?!" shouted the girl while rounding on Mrs. Universe.

Mary's hands transferred to her hips and she loomed over the teen. "Because his girlfriend is a magical warrior princess!"

"I didn't ask him to do this! This morning I asked if we could hang out, not take silly photos after _getting captured!"_

"He's been tryin' to impress you ever since the invasion!" shouted the incensed mother.

"Why?!"

Meanwhile, without either consciously meaning to, Mr. Universe and Lapis had drifted over next to one another, the two watching the exchange like spectators at a tennis game.

Or a boxing match.

"Because," bellowed Mrs. Universe, anger and distress writ across her features, "He feels bad for not facing down a giant warship from space like you did!"

"I didn't face-" and Connie stopped to pinch the bridge of her nose. A breath and then, eyes still closed, "That fight was a mess; it wasn't like I just summoned my sword and cut the ship in half or anything."

Turning her attention back to Mrs. Universe, the fires of indignation stoked once more, Connie said loudly, "And stop putting this on me. _I_ told Steven to stay away."

"Because he could’ve died!" shouted Mary.

"Exactly!" answered Connie.

"Starlight-" and Mr. Universe offered a small, apologetic smile when his wife turned his way. "You saw their texts after we evacuated. I think you're both on the same side with this."

Mrs. Universe drew herself up and pointed a finger accusingly at Connie. "Our son would never have lied or snuck ‘round behind our backs or done anything so _meshugaas_ before he met her!"

A southern twang had slowly crept into her voice during her shouting match, but apparently if you made Mrs. Universe angry enough then a sprinkling of Yiddish joined the mix.

"Hey," objected Lapis, arms crossed.

Having to angle her head up to meet Mary's glare, the gemstone at her back flickered as if she was _this close_ to summoning her wings and looming over the woman.

Instead she bared her corruption-scarred arms and said, "Pinkie has had every chance to run away screaming. And it's not like we put on a good front and lured him in. You remember New Year's, right? Cripes, he and Con-con harpooned a corrupted Kunzite the day they met." She shook her head, long hair swaying with the motion. "I'm sorry but your son's sudden outbreak of _chutzpah?_ I'm pretty sure that was a preexisting condition."

Mrs. Universe's expression was fierce but her eyes were scared. Focusing her glare on Lapis, she was about to open her mouth to say something acerbic when her husband stepped in and laid a hand on her arm.

"I left home, changed my name, and tried to become a rockstar. You ran away from home by sneaking into a rockstar's van." He gave her a wan smile. "Karma just has a weird sense of humor. And timing."

Mary stared at her husband for a moment longer before her eyes fell to the floor. "Fine. None of that's what's important." Her frame shuddered but she didn't break down and Connie had the impression that if P2 had walked through the door just then, the woman would have descended like a vengeful avalanche in an instant.

Looking back up at Mr. Universe, she said firmly, "Our son needs to be okay. We need to find him and bring him home." Her eyes swept across the room. "All of us."

Lapis nodded and Mr. Universe said, "Yeah," but the silence after that was conspicuous. Three sets of eyes turned to find Connie with her brows furrowed, concentrating as she looked at... nothing in particular.

Just as Mr. Universe was about to wave a hand in front of the girl's face there was a sound like a distant howl and then a portal opened up, Wolf rocketing through and skidding across the Beach House interior only to stop _just_ in time and fall neatly sideways onto the couch.

It looked even more impressive to the Universes, who hadn't been around for the dozens of botched attempts made learning the trick.

Wolf panted happily and wagged his tail, a giant, yellow picture of canine innocence. Connie was having none of it and stormed over, arms thrust down at her sides, jaw clenched.

"Wolf, where's Steven?"

Doggy eyelashes fluttered and a yellow head nuzzled one of Connie's balled fists as if to inquire about ear scratches.

"We know what's really been going on," ground out Connie. "So Wolf-" and the girl's words were wrapped in iron and warning, "-where's Steven?"

The hound abruptly dropped the act, mouth snapping shut, expression serious as he stepped down from the couch. Sitting upright with his haunches on the hardwood floor, Wolf was tall enough to look Connie directly in the eyes.

Gaze never wavering, Wolf reached up slowly and draped his right paw on Connie's nose. Even done gently, paws were not designed for delicate work, especially not one attached to a hound the size of a small car, so when Wolf wiggled Connie's nose it caused the girl's head to move side-to-side like she was disagreeing.

Just as slowly, the paw went back to the floor. Wolf licked his chops and stared at Connie for another beat, demeanor earnest throughout.

Connie had gone a little cross eyed as the paw approached her, and after she blinked: first in confusion, then in surprise. "It'll be okay?" she said, hesitantly, translating the gesture. 

Blink-blink. "Wait, you know about that gesture?" Connie jolted again. "Wait! You're not going to lead us to Steven?!"

Wolf inclined his head in wordless apology but his resolute expression never wavered.

Mrs. Universe decided that was quite enough and marched over. "No. _Bad dog!_ Bad, giant, magical dog! Whatever you and my son are doing needs to stop. Bring him home!"

The reprimand caused Wolf's ears to droop first, with his head following a second later. However, he weathered the barrage without budging.

Connie had been staring distractedly into the middle distance after her earlier exclamation, chasing a thought or perhaps listening to some quiet voice within herself. After Mary's upbraiding, however, the teen crouched down where the hangdog dog was looking at her and asked, "You two are planning something, aren't you?"

Wolf licked his chops in the affirmative. Then he raised one paw off the floor to about knee height.

"Half-planning, half-improvising," Connie amended. 

This earned an actual nod in response.

"He's in danger. You know that, right?" she insisted.

Another nod.

"And it's really..." She wiggled her nose --Lapis, off to the side, mouthing 'so cute' to herself-- “...going to be alright? You're certain?"

Nod.

A beat passed and then Connie's shoulders slumped, helplessness and worry radiating off the girl. "Alright. We believe you."

"We do?!" exclaimed the Universes over one another.

Connie's demeanor shifted in an instant, the girl of barely-contained wrath from earlier back again. She leveled a finger at Wolf and said, "Don't you _dare_ let him get hurt, Wolf. You and Steven chose to do this and neither of you are helpless or dumb. So, okay, finish your secret mission because the world is literally threatened right now and this might be extremely important.”

She ran a hand through her frazzled hair and sucked in another lungful of air, pinning Wolf with her gaze throughout. “But I don't care about missions or pride or you running away mid-invasion or Steven having to evacuate. The second someone's going to get hurt, you get him and you come home." She tilted her head forward, glare intensifying. _"Understood?"_

Earns pinned to his head, eyes lowered in submission, Wolf bobbed his head hurriedly.

Slowly, he began to inch away from the terrifying teenager. Then, as soon as he was clear of the coffee table, he double-timed it over to the door, worked the handle with his paws, nosed it open, pawed the screen door open, and sprinted out the door and down the stairs.

A distant howl was heard, the light of a portal appearing and then vanishing soon after.

For a time, all was quiet, every eye trained on the now-vacant doorway.

Lapis broke the silence first. "Honestly, seeing a dog leave like that has been the weirdest thing I’ve seen all day… and that’s including the multi-story, four-handed giant formed of desperation and I-don’t-even-know-what from this morning."

Deciding to leave the stormy Connie be, Mr. Universe turned to Lapis and said, "We've already contacted the authorities in Beckley and a few other towns in the area. I've also told Ronaldo to contact us the second he learns anything else, since he's somehow in the loop on all this. We'll let you know if anyone sees anything. Please-"

But Lapis answered his request before it was finished. "We'll tell you the moment anything happens here, Papaverse. Scout’s honor," and she gave the three-finger salute.

He nodded, offering a grateful smile even though the worry around his eyes remained.

"I'm going to be so angry with him when he gets back," muttered Connie, staring at the open door. "Both of them," she amended.

"Get in line," growled Mary.

* * *

"Steven? Steven. _Steven."_

One of P2's floating fingers hovered over to prod the dozing figure, the levitated digit poking him more-or-less at random across the face. The teen, seated beside P2 in the purple helicopter that was Amethyst, managed to resist waking until the floating finger prodded an ear. He woke with a snort and hastily waved the invader away from the side of his head.

Ever since he'd stopped wearing his hearing aids, he'd been kind of sensitive about his ears.

Seeing Steven blearily return to consciousness, P2 said, "Steven. You are about to exceed your ten minute window to ask a question. Ask soon or forfeit your turn.

Still trying to wake from his nine-minute nap, Steven blinked and looked around confused. "Mwhu?" he mumbled. The teen was a morning person, not a night owl, and this was well past his preferred bedtime on top of having been a _very_ eventful day.

P2 tutted, one arm trained outside the cockpit of the Ame-copter to maintain the tractor beam hold on the green escape pod that there wasn't room for inside. "Please master your organic feebleness and return to the game at hand or I will be forced to penalize you." She paused, a floating finger tapping her chin. "Though first I'd have to invent some penalties."

"Can we take his stuff?" asked Amethyst, the purple copter's voice resonating inside the cabin.

"His belongings were confiscated upon capture, so I don't believe so," mused P2.

Steven managed to shake the worst of the dream fluff from his mind and stammered, "No, 's okay. I'm up." He yawned and mopped his face, curls blowing in the windy helicopter cabin. "Sorry, I'm just not-" and another yawn interrupted him. "-Just not very good at resisting a rest," he quipped with a tired smirk.

"Resisting a- HA!" and having P2 laugh percussively a foot from his face shook the rest of the dream fluff free. "It's a play on words because 'arrest' and 'a rest' are homophones and you're neither skilled at forestalling dormancy or thwarting your own capture!"

If Steven hadn't been subject to P2's affably blunt personality for most of the day, he'd probably be a little hurt, or at least worried the gem was mocking him. As is, he just shook his head and said, "You're really energetic, aren't you?"

"Yes," exclaimed the gem. "Invading Earth has been the most stimulating activity I've experienced in cycles. Not since I was allowed into the Diamond sanctum on the station to learn shard sculpting have I felt this excited," and she looked at him with a wide grin.

Steven rubbed one eye and took a swig from a bottle of soda --not only could Amethyst shapeshift into a helicopter but she could even make cup holders-- before asking, "Okay, um, when Wolf and me were tracking you after you left the water park, your scent just kind of stopped." He yawned. "How did you do that?"

P2 looked at him quizzically. "Who and what is this 'Wolf' you speak of?" A beat. "That is a clarification, not a question in its own right and therefore is allowed," she added hastily.

A part of Steven considered arguing, because that so too was another question, but the rest of him was quietly screaming at having given something away. Trying desperately to un-reveal his secret teammate's identity, he said, "Oh, Wolf's the name of... a dog. He helped me follow your smell while I was looking for you guys." All technically true, which was important when you were a terrible liar.

The technician studied him, the teen sweating despite the chilly interior. Then she smiled and said, "We happened across a container of chemical deodorant and doused ourselves in it to remove the lingering chemical scent. Not that we were doing it to evade pursuit, mind you, but because it was an unpleasant aroma."

"Puante," added Ame-copter, which, Steven assumed from context, was French for 'smelly.'

"Wait, so you just _found_ a jug of anti-stink chemicals?" He stared at P2 perplexed. "Weren't you guys in the wilderness?"

"Yes, that's what happened," agreed P2, seemingly seeing nothing odd about that.

"But... Where did the jug come from?"

A shrug of green shoulders and a hummed 'I dunno' was as much answer as Steven was going to get. Then, leaning forward with hungry amusement, P2 said, "My turn! What rebel-installed defenses and alerts are there in the approach to and within the command center of the Prime Kindergarten?"

However, Steven was distracted, looking out the cockpit at the rocky, moonlit landscape below, barren save for a few trees scattered here and there. No lights of cities or homes were visible, so wherever they were, it was probably pretty remote.

There was what Steven thought was a glimpse of yellow below and he made an effort not to look too relieved or excited, an effort which being super duper tired probably helped.

"What was the question again?" he asked, trying to sound casual.

"A list of the defenses and alerts surrounding the Kindergarten and control room thereof," prompted P2.

"Right, right," nodded Steven. He rubbed the other eye and said, "I know Miss Peridot tried to put more alarms in place on the computer. And the, like, giant smashy hands were turned off."

"Yes, the control room limb proxies. Anything else?" pressed the green gem.

Steven shrugged. "The gems probably patrol around there, but I don't know about anything else."

P2's mouth quirked not really into a frown (she almost never frowned, not that Steven had seen) but into less of a smile than usual. "Your incomplete knowledge of Crystal Gem activity is slightly frustrating."

With what was _actually_ a frown, Steven silently agreed.

P2 shrugged. "Though plausible given your organic frailties and peripheral position among the rebels."

The frown deepened.

Then the Ame-copter banked and Steven had to grab the seat for stability as the purple gem shouted, "We're here, copains!" Steven had no idea what the French word meant, but she sounded happy so it probably wasn't anything bad.

A second later and the copter plunged, Steven using both hands to grip the sides and scream while P2 and Amethyst sounded like they were enjoying themselves. Then the helicopter blades were gone, replaced with wings, and Plane-methyst swooped up to kill their forward momentum before turning into a kind of half-parachute, half-octopus that was laughing as parachute and pair of para-passengers drifted down between the walls of a canyon.

"Very creatively done, Amethyst," praised P2, reaching out to meet one of the purple parachute tentacles for a high five. Steven whimpered and didn't even notice when his soda bottle was sneakily transferred up to be munched on by the smiling parachute overhead.

After the day he'd had, Steven was considering if it was too late to develop a fear of heights.

They landed and Amethyst turned back into herself, bits of plastic caught between her teeth for some reason. P2, gemstone glowing like a flashlight, set the escape pod down and used both limb enhancers to scan the area, a surprised hum on her lips.

"Hmm, perhaps my directional data was flawed," she said while sweeping the area in green light. "This is where the Prime Kindergarten is supposed to be located, but there's far too much native flora for that to be the case."

Amethyst tugged one of the many tough plants growing in the dusty soil up, sniffing it. "Yeah, and I don't remember there being beaucoup de fleurs here either."

Dusting himself off, Steven shook his head and started to answer when he said, "I know that one, actually, but it isn't my turn in the game."

They were at the Kindergarten which meant it was Serious Steven time, not Sleepy Steven or Silly Steven.

P2's eyebrows raised in curiosity, then her smile widened in amusement. "Oh? Very good! I'll count this toward a question buffer for your future use. Now, please, elucidate us, captive."

The green gem sometimes forgot about his _call me Steven, not ‘captive’_ request and Steven wasn’t feeling up to correcting her just then. "Connie and Miss Peridot made the Kindergarten less nasty for life." A beat. "Earth life," he corrected. "Something to do with relocating minerals." He shrugged. "Miss Peridot told me once but it was full of a lot of science-y words I didn't really understand."

Amethyst stomped on a bud, scowling, then hustled forward without a word. Well, some words, but they were all in French and sounded pretty grumpy so Steven assumed they weren't the sort of words you learned in French class. P2 shot him a questioning look and then jogged after to keep pace, grabbing her escape pod in a tractor beam as she did.

A glance behind him showed a yellow blur tailing them so the secret team secret mission was still going. Steven hurried to catch up.

* * *

Amethyst had been grumpy at the fact that there was stuff growing around the hole she'd emerged from. After muttering some unpleasant things about 'people who changed someone's home while they're gone' and some angry weed pulling, Amethyst declared the job good enough and proceeded to show them around. She introduced them to the various rocks and broken injectors that had been her family before she'd eventually met the Quartz Pack.

P2 had been distracted, however; something about the plants growing in the Kindergarten causing her to alternate between wonder, confusion, and excitement. Steven racked up a bunch more buffered questions trying to address her burning curiosity.

Finally they made their way to a big square of greenish metal on the ground which was the elevator to the control room. Amethyst was told to stay close to Steven 'in her capacity as security escort,' an order the gem took rather literally, but Steven had gotten used to her lack of a personal bubble to mind too much.

P2 spent long enough doing something with her limb enhancers --"To circumvent some alerts cunningly hidden in the control room lift," she said chipperly-- that Steven led the trio in a sing-along to pass the time.

That he'd made the suggestion after there was a noise of rocks being disturbed behind them, possibly by a certain yellow tag-along, was surely coincidence.

By the time they reached sixty-two bottles of beer on the wall, P2 had the elevator de-trapped... though she enjoyed the singing enough she kept it going as they rode down into the control room.

The sheer amount of plant life in the control room meant they made it to forty-one bottles before P2 was ready to even approach the controls; she eventually scripted her limb enhancers to sing the song in her stead so she could focus on 'untying the tangled knot of security alerts, conflicting file structures, and post hoc repairs holding this Kindergarten together.'

With Amethyst's help, Steven was learning his French numbers, getting down into the single digits when P2 declared she had access.

"Hey P2?" asked Steven, trying to hide his growing nervousness. "What are you doing with the Kindergarten anyway?"

Amethyst, meanwhile, started dragging Steven from one end of the room to the other so she could satisfy her curiosity while making good on her commitment as guard.

P2 looked up briefly from the cloud of holograms surrounding her, two of the gem's floating fingers jacked into the control room panel. "Ah, I'm afraid that's restricted information."

Steven, now hanging out next to a panel as Amethyst prodded at the buds flowering over the outside of it, replied, "Okay, but I'm just an unimportant, human member of the Crystal Gems. Plus, I've been captured so it's not like I could tell anyone," a statement that was technically true, or so he kept trying to tell the nervousness butterflies whirling in his tummy.

The technician summoned her visor and watched some data stream across it before unsummoning it. "While those are good points, I fail to see a positive motivator for sharing that information."

Steven discreetly wiped the sweat off his forehead, and not because the control room in warm. "Well, I have a lot of questions saved up in our game. What if I spent all of them on this?"

P2 gave a long 'hmmm,' having to once more return her attention to the gem squiggles flying across her displays. "Very well," she said eventually, her eyes sparkling, "but mainly because it is _so very fascinating_ and I'm eager to share."

Mustering a wide and excited smile, Steven nodded back and tried to will himself to be smart enough to remember all this.

"During the Earth colony conflict, the Diamonds decided to reap a different benefit from the planetary system than the usual harvest of Kindergartens, raw materials, and infrastructure. Instead, the Earth would be used as an incubator for a truly massive geo-weapon, a forced fusion of millions of gem shards known as the Cluster. It has slowly developed within the Earth's mantle and while it would eventually form on its own, I am able to quicken this final stage, as I am doing now," explained P2 with as close to breathless enthusiasm as someone who didn't actually need to breath could.

A bunch of data streamed across the big screen in the room before P2 did something to route it into the smaller displays hovering in front of her.

"Whoa, Peridude. How are we going to get my Pack out of here? And is that thing going to break my stuff when it comes out of its hole?" asked Amethyst, her attention, like Steven's, trained entirely on P2.

“I am uncertain to your first concern. They’re in the hands of the rebel vestige so you would need to acquire their cooperation, somehow, which seems unlikely given their violently antagonistic ways. As to the second...” P2 nodded yes with a chipper hum. "Most likely. The Earth will be broken into multiple planetoids and planetesimals as a result of the Cluster's emergence. It's possible some of your stuff will survive the cataclysmic tectonic activity and the sundering of the sphere, but it's unlikely that much, if any atmosphere will remain afterwards, so I expect a large part of the remainder would get degraded beyond use by cold and vacuum."

Steven's jaw had dropped and a jet of cold had shot down his spine before curling up in his tummy like a block of ice. A giant, planet-breaking monster in the planet?! It took an act of will to get his mouth back into making-words mode. "How quick is this, uh, quickening?"

Holograms appeared and vanished as P2 did her technician thing. In an eager tone of voice she answered back, "This is a literally unprecedented experiment, so it's not known!" Then, sensing the wide-eyed reception of her audience, she said a bit more comfortingly, "But it won't be for a few months at the earliest. More than time enough for Amethyst, Rose Quartz, her Pearl, and me to evacuate the system." A floating finger went up to rub her chin. "Hmm, perhaps you as well, if you continue to prove informative and/or diverting. The Zoo station is well-equipped to meet your needs as a carbon-based organic."

"Um... thank you?" said the teen, the ‘arms in the air, running in circles while screaming' in his head making it hard for him to respond any better than that... or even unpack this whole 'zoo' thing in more detail.

P2 took the statement at face value and gave a benevolent nod. "You're welcome."

Steven licked his suddenly dry lips. "Where did the gem shards come from?" he asked, almost certain he wasn't going to like the answer.

"I'm unsure," answered P2. "I've never inquired where the specimens came from when I experimented on them?"

"Wait, you made the Cluster?!" squawked the teen.

P2 blinked and then shook her head, a 'you have much to learn' chuckle accompanying it. "The Cluster was formed and injected well before I emerged. Before Era-2 even began, in fact. No, the Cluster predates me by millennia, but I have been trained to understand, shape, and guide forced fusions such as this for precisely this task." She paused. "Well, not _exclusively_ for this task-" she preened, "-but a further explanation would earn me a rather sizable question buffer of my own and I think I prefer the direct, quid pro quo back-and-forth of our questions game over this format."

Steven made a strangled noise and a distant part of him wondered if his face was going to get stuck like this.

"But to answer your specific question," continued P2, ignoring his silent freakout, "I suspect the gem shards came from casualties from the conflict. That and shattered rebel gems. I mean, given the sheer volume required for the Cluster, the Diamonds probably made shattering enemy combatants required, or at least strongly preferred."

Amethyst, beside him, shared a look with Steven then dropped to her duff. "Calvaire de Sacristie," she mumbled. "Guess I'm less ticked about the plants around my hole now."

"Is-" and forming words wasn't any easier than before. "Is there a way to stop the Cluster from forming? Or getting it out so it doesn't break the Earth?"

The technician raised her head from her work and gave Steven a puzzled stare. "Hypothetically speaking, yes, though it'd be impractical, bordering on the impossible given the time and resources available. However, I don't see how that line of questioning is relevant," she huffed, annoyed as if Steven had interrupted a really good story to ask someone to pull his finger.

Steven managed to swallow and ran a hand through his hair, eyes looking at nothing in particular. He nodded, a more Steven-sized kind of scared churning in his tummy alongside the planet-sized freakout within. "Alright," he said to himself. Then, blinking, he added to P2, "Thank you for that, by the way."

P2 smiled. "You're welcome, Steven. If you're curious, there's a number of far tinier, early-forming prototypes I've begun the automated sequence of exhuming for study and release, and I can talk you through that process as well. Plus, I suspect the warning about their fascinating but unusual appearance will prevent some amount of screaming and running in the near future."

The teen shook his head. "No thank you. This Cluster thing is a really big deal that the gems need to know about, so I have to escape now." A beat. "But it was fun hanging out with you and Amethyst."

"Wait, you have to do what?" asked the technician after a moment of surprised silence. Amethyst, meanwhile, started to get to her feet.

In answer, Steven shouted, "WOOOLF!" and a split-second later there was an echo-y howling sound and then a portal flew open, Wolf rocketing out.

Amethyst lunged forward with a shout of, "Hey, you're friends with Le Chien Jaune? That's kinda neat actu-" but the rest of her sentence got cut off when a super bark threw the purple gem backwards into the wall.

Steven leapt onto Wolf's back as P2’s limb enhancer that wasn’t plugged into the controls configured into blaster mode. The pair disappeared into a portal a split-second before plasma fire riddled the wall behind where they'd just been full of smoking craters.

For several seconds, the only sound in the control room was of Amethyst slowly sliding to the floor, her long, white mane trailing behind her before collapsing forward in her face. Then P2, disengaging her limb enhancer from the controls and heading toward the elevator out of the control room, said, "My familiarity with Earth's life forms is crude, so tell me... _What in the empty sky was that?!"_

* * *

Connie was latched onto Steven like a barnacle, half in a hug and half as a way of keeping him from getting away. Not that he was trying to escape, but she wasn’t taking any chances. They were situated on the couch and the only reason they hadn't already called his parents was because Steven had loudly pleaded for them not to just yet.

It was late. Super late, and a part of Connie felt a little self-conscious clutching Steven in her PJs, but the rest of her loudly overruled that part because this was way more important than winter sleepwear.

Wolf was sitting on the floor back behind the warp pad (which, coincidentally, was about as far as he could be from Connie), the large hound trying hard to look very small and inconspicuous.

Mom and Jasper had returned home a little before Steven and Wolf had portaled in, the pair having split from Tiger's Eye just before warping home. When pressed on the matter by Lapis, Peridot had argued quite indignantly that it wasn't like they could split _after_ warping to the Beach House, given the size of the fusion involved.

That probably wasn’t what Lapis had meant but no one pressed the subject, especially not after the howl portal had opened.

Each of them had vanished seconds after Steven had gotten out the words 'P2' and 'Prime Kindergarten,' pausing only long enough for Jasper to grab the bulky handheld device Mom called her ersatz terminal.

Lapis, meanwhile, had taken a seat on a bar stool and was digging into a pile of junk food she'd gotten after warping _somewhere_, and she was not in a mood to share. As best Connie could guess, the writing on the wrappers was Tibetan. Every so often Lapis would take a break from aggressive snacking to offer Bismuth's gemstone a mild flick, as if tweaking the nose of someone currently without a face.

The warp pad lit up and Mom and Jasper stepped clear, the former holding her ham radio-Frankensteined-to-a-Speak-n-Spell terminal.

"Gone," was Jasper's one-word assessment.

"Were your security protocols able to keep P2 from doing... whatever she was trying to do, Ma'am?" asked Connie from the couch.

Mom shook her head and began to pace the room after setting her boxy terminal on the coffee table. "Negative, though that was always a distant hope. During our previous confrontation in the control center, when this rival Peridot had been attempting to access the Kindergarten remotely, she made it clear that she had too great a technological edge in terms of intrusion methods to shut her out entirely, given her comparatively advanced... pristine... fully-functional..." and Mom's gaze had drifted off into the middle distance as she spoke mournfully.

"Peridot," warned Jasper.

Mom jolted in place. "Pardon? Oh, yes, erm, excuse me," and her cheeks flushed in shame. With a stabilizing sigh, she managed to say, "Keeping that Peridot out was too unlikely to form the basis for a strategy around. Instead, I tried to insinuate enough subtle logging protocols that I could glean her authentication and/or encryption keys. With those I would be able to either undo her work post facto, access any files my snooping suite logged, or both."

"Mo-" Connie cleared her throat. "Ma'am, that's... really smart."

Steven nodded for emphasis.

Peridot's flush deepened, but this time there was an accompanying grin. "That is kind of you to say, dear. It was, I speculated, the most fruitful tactic available to me given the... asymmetric nature of the struggle."

"Did it work?" asked Jasper.

Mom's bright expression dimmed slightly but not completely. "Partially. The Peridot engaged a number of processes that are autonomous and completely irreversible. Her limb enhancers acted as a one-time pad, so even decrypting that wouldn't afford me access into the parts of the system under Diamond-tier restrictions. However, her personal authentication information was harvested so I should be able to use it toward other ends."

Lapis perked up. "Like unlocking that crystal dealie you swiped from the ship?"

Peridot smiled. Then she seemed to realize who had spoken and she frowned. "Yes, that was my intention."

This resulted in a rather tense series of short exchanges between blue and green gem, something which Connie, accompanied by a sinking sensation in her gut, tried not to pay too close of attention to.

"Hey, everyone," called the girl after a few more seconds of pseudo-squabbling. "We really need to find out what Steven wants to tell us. And then we need to call his parents, because I already feel bad that they don't know he's safe." Her grip on Steven tightened fractionally and Steven swallowed nervously.

With that Peridot started to head for the bar stools but stopped, either because she'd be sitting beside Lapis or because it'd be a difficult and undignified climb for her. Instead she pivoted and hobble-walked over to the couch, getting situated on the cushion to Connie's right, short green feet kicking over the edge. "Proceed," she said a beat later.

Connie looked to Steven who managed another swallow and said, "So, Wolf and me found P2 and Amethyst. They captured me but I was able to kind of turn it into a game, where we did some fun stuff like getting desserts or asking each other questions instead of, like, me going to space jail or something."

"Yeah," murmured Lapis around a mouthful of what looked like rice pudding. She swallowed. "Your momma made sure we knew about your trip to the mall."

This prompted Steven to shrink a little in his seat.

"It was quick thinking," defended Connie. "The photo booth, I mean. And it _did_ get the fact of his capture out to the rest of us like it was meant to."

A corner of Connie was ready to chew Steven out, wanted to shake him and yell at him for scaring everyone (but mostly her) so much... but it was different when other people were the ones being critical of her boyfriend.

That and she had an inkling of what was waiting for Steven at home. All corners of Connie, be they in the 'hug Steven' or the 'throttle Steven' camps, were united in the hope that there'd be any of him left over after his mom got finished.

Offering her a faint smile and signing his thanks, Steven said, "The thing is, P2 and Amethyst were headed for the Kindergarten."

Jasper offered a slight nod, inclining her head toward the warp pad she and Peridot had just warped back from there with.

"R-Right," stammered Steven, feeling tense under Connie's grip. "Well, I got P2- Oh, that's, like, her name now, by the way. At least on Earth. She seemed happy with it." He shook his head, the curly hair tickling Connie's neck as he did. "Anyway, I got P2 to tell me what she was doing."

"Whewy?" mumbled Lapis around a mouthful and grabbing something at random from the pile to start unwrapping it.

Steven nodded. "Really. We were playing a questions game and I let her get a lot of extra asks in and then I said how I was just a-" He paused, chin drooping. "Anyway, she said that what she was doing was awakening the Cluster."

Connie blinked. "But I thought- That's what Rose was calling Pink Diamond's shards." Through the curtain of Steven's curls she looked across the room. "There's not more of Pink Diamond out there, is there?"

Jasper shook her head. "Not on Earth. Citrine kept the majority of the pieces anyway."

Mom opened her mouth to speak but Steven interrupted her, and Connie could feel the tension radiating from him even as she heard the strained quality to his voice. "I don't know what Rose was talking about-"

"Probably lying. Again," ground out Jasper, her voice, mild, though her demeanor, anything but.

"-But the Cluster is, like, millions of shards all forced together. Regular gem shards, not Diamond shards, I mean. It's been growing in the Earth since the Rebellion and it's supposed to wake up in a couple of months," and Steven's voice was heavy. Then, as if the words had to push their way through a throat too small to fit them, he said. "When it does, it'll destroy the Earth."

For a second, you could hear a pin drop in the Beach House.

Then Peridot jolted out of her seat, landing awkwardly on the hardwood floor before clambering upright and thrusting her ersatz terminal at Steven like a sword. "Steven, I'll need you to tell me _every_ detail you can recall of this revelation, in as exacting detail as you ca-," at the same time that Lapis said, "Oh, that dirty, pink, gravel-sucking, lying, two-faced bi-"

The pair's words were cut off, however, when movement and a bright glow appeared over the kitchen counter. Bismuth's gemstone rose into the air, hovering back into the kitchen until the counter was no longer directly beneath. Then there was a pulse of rainbow light and a solid-white figure, like a Bismuth-shaped manikin, emerged, dangling from the stone set in its chest. A trio of forms flickered by before settling on a fourth, one Connie wasn't familiar with. There was a final pulse and then the smith herself appeared, color returned, eyes closed. She hovered down gently.

There was no star, exactly, but the design on her left shoulder was really similar to the seven-pointed rainbow symbol on the Breaking Point.

That she had a gaudy plastic tiara on her head didn't diminish Connie's excitement, nor Steven's from the way they both sprung to their feet. Lapis, meanwhile, grabbed an old Polaroid camera from somewhere and snapped a picture of the rousing Bismuth.

The long-absent smith opened her eyes and took in her surroundings. "Huh. Guess we won." She smiled. "Good job, gals."

"Not exactly," muttered Jasper.

Peridot, expression bitter but resolute, hobbled over and grabbed Steven by the hand, tugging the teen in the direction of the temple -- presumably so she could better conduct her debriefing. Over her shoulder she said, "I'm pleased you're back. Now gather your equipment, because we're building a drill."

Bismuth blinked. "A drill? I get the feeling I’m missing something load-bearing right now."

“Sure are, princess,” answered Lapis around a smirk, shaken by Steven’s revelation but unable to contain her gadfly excitement at Bismuth’s return.

“You know the rebels we could never find?” said Jasper, the Quartz’ own body language radiating hostility despite her habitual stoicism.

“Yeah?” Just then Bismuth raked a hand through her hair and found the gaudy plastic tiara resting atop her head. She looked at it confused for a second before crushing it _very thoroughly_ while glaring daggers at a smugly contented Lapis.

“We found them.”

Casting the plastic fragments aside, Bismuth’s eyes lit up. “That’s great!”

Connie gave a brief wave to Steven as he and Mom entered the temple. Already reaching for her phone to call his parents, she spared a look at Bismuth and said somberly, “No… it’s not.”

Bismuth cocked her head to the side. Then her expression hardened. “That’s bad.”

“The worst,” was Jasper’s terse conclusion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The model of Bismuth was drawn by BurdenKing. I'll talk more about said model, but first...
> 
> So, Ep37 isn't done. Not yet. After all, we haven't touched on Connie and Steven's talk about (among other things) his secret mission, or Lapis and Peridot's Tiger's Eye chat, or looked in on what the heck Rose has been up to! Anyway, stay tuned, because next Wednesday, September 11th, will be a _cluster_ (eh? eh?) of epilogues as we conclude _Injecting Some Fun!_
> 
> Back to the model, Bismuth didn't reform with armor covering her left arm and shoulder. Gems can reform with clothes or even minor equipment, like glasses or visors, but it's my co-creator's and my opinion that armor is too much. No, Bismuth would have to make the physical armor for that... and will soon. However, she has the same star-like symbol on her left shoulder, which Connie saw, and you can consider this her look going forward after she's had a little time to get her outfit in order.
> 
> Also, that star-like symbol is really similar to the design the Breaking Point Bismuth showed up for the invasion with. To quote Ep35Ch2:
>
>> Another chuckle from Bismuth. "Yeah, keep hitting that wall, Pink. Maybe you'll crack it eventually. But I think I'll crack you first. See, I've got this-" and Bismuth stood up, the arm in her golf bag emerging with something heavy strapped to it. **It had a metal plunger like the head of a nail emerging from the back, a long, menacing spike of dark metal extending out the front, and a star emblazoned on the side that was painted with every color of Bismuth's gemstone.** "-And it's the reason you're wearing that shattered diamond on your chest. If you miss your precious Pink Diamond so much, maybe you'll appreciate going out the same way she did."
> 
> When I wrote that I knew that Bismuth wasn't going to reform with a traditional star on her outfit, and that her new design would roughly match what she emblazoned on her Breaking Point. However, I didn't want to fence in my art-capable co-creators so I kept the specifics a little vague in Ep35. I'm pleased as punch with BurdenKing's take on it, and you can imagine a seven-point star on the Breaking Point that's a similar look to the stylized star on Bismuth's shoulder.
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you have a Connie Swap story burning in your soul that you want to see in our official, curated Omake collection, drop us a comment either in the Omake fic or here in the main fic and we'll get in touch.
> 
> Connie Swap has an official Discord for the fans. [Come check it out.](https://discord.gg/RQMDdhr)
> 
> As usual, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments and your asks at the [Connie Swap Tumblr](http://connieswap.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


	8. Steven Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the second half of this chapter there's a conversation that references details about the finale of the show _Avatar: The Last Airbender._ If that'd be a spoiler you want to avoid, read carefully; you'll recognize it when it gets close.

Fortunately, Mom and Dad were willing to let Steven get some sleep after taking him home from the Beach House to the bus, which was good because after the early morning and climbing the bridge and getting captured and getting held at blaster-point and going to the mall and eating too many cinnamon rolls and sending a secret silly photo booth photo message and answering a bajillion questions and going to the Kindergarten and learning about the Cluster and escaping the Kindergarten and having Connie clutching him and talking to the gems and answering another bajillion questions... After all that Steven was super-duper-mega-ultra tired and would have fallen asleep mid-grounding.

That would probably have been bad.

When he finally did wake up it was with Lion sitting on his chest and staring at the foot of his bed, his tail swishing back and forth to lightly tickle Steven's cheek and nose.

_Oh, he must be hungry for breakfast,_ thought the teen sleepily, his tummy adding that Lion wasn't the only one.

With a face-splitting yawn and some clumsy petting, Steven blinked away some of the dream fluff and showed Lion that he appreciated his company. Eventually he rose, Lion hopping down and staring back at him from the doorway to his small room inside the bus. "I'm coming," Steven mumbled around another yawn, rising and stretching and feeling sore in, like, a dozen places or more.

"Shtu-ball? Is that you?" called Dad from down the bus.

"Yeah, Dad. Good morning." Just then his bladder made an urgent announcement and Steven froze nearly to the doorway. "Can you make sure Lion has some breakfast?" he asked, offering his fuzzy friend an apologetic smile as he turned for the bathroom instead of the combination kitchen/dining room.

There was a chuckle from Dad. "No can do, bud, since he ate his breakfast hours ago. But I can make sure his royal fluffiness' lunch is served."

Blinking in confusion, Steven looked around his small room until he spotted his bedside alarm clock. _It's 2:23?!_

His head swiveled around to the sunlight streaming through the window to make sure it was two in the afternoon instead of two at night. Wow, he'd slept... really late. Like, Jeff-late, who, according to Peedee, had spent most of the hotel days so far sleeping until that after lunch, but before dinner. Linner? Was that a word?

After visiting the bathroom, Steven walked a little anxiously into the cozy kitchen/dining room, too nervous to rush but too hungry to spend the time to change out of his pajamas. He'd grabbed a light blanket and draped it over himself like a warm cape, less because he was chilly and more because it was comforting.

Dad was sitting at the table, doodling musical notation in the margins of his newspaper --he claimed he composed better on napkins than on staff paper-- while the sound of kitty kibble being crunched was heard nearby. More importantly, there was a salad, a bowl of fruit salad, a half-empty box of donuts (from a place in Crossroads; the Big Donut still wasn't reopened), and three paper-wrapped sandwiches waiting for him. With an eager tummy gurgle, Steven slid into the booth-style dining room table and started to dig in, his dad getting him a tall glass of orange juice when he got up to refill his mug of coffee.

Food was a big deal in the Universe family, and the spread waiting for him was as good as a hug at telling him his parents loved him. Not as warm as a hug --Steven had slept in pretty late-- but way more filling.

There was a crinkling sound as Dad looked up from the music-scribbled paper and stared out the window. "They're really working hard out there," he said.

Steven, swallowing but not lowering his sandwich, followed his dad's gaze to see the cleanup crews moving like busy bees in hard hats and reflective jackets. He nodded in agreement as he took another large bite. Absently he tugged his blanket-cape so that it was keeping his back, sides, and shoulders warm without being in any of the major crumb or spill zones.

"The mayor wants to give everyone the option of moving back home in time for Harvest Festival," said Dad. He took a sip of coffee, eyes following a particularly burly pair of workers unloading bundles of shingles from the back of a truck, stacking a pile of them in front of every house that'd suffered roof damage. "It's a good idea. He's been able to make it feel kind of like a city-wide vacation, with the hotel and buffets and movies. But people want to be home for the holidays, even if the boardwalk is roped off and most of the stores around town will still be closed."

That would include the car wash, which had been damaged, not least of all when a part of the collapsing lighthouse had smacked into it. Not that there was a lot of demand for a car wash in winter, though.

Another nod from Steven, with an 'mhmm' added since anything else would have meant speaking with food in his mouth.

"I told the workers they could come by around dinner, by the way," said Dad casually as he turned from the window to face him. "Starlight and I didn't want them waking you up this morning, so we postponed opening Cafe Universe until later."

Cafe Universe had become the family term for Dad letting the workers use his fancy coffee machine most mornings. Steven had even worked as a barista a couple of times, though he'd never gotten the hang of making little designs in the drinks like some real baristas could do.

Steven nodded and grinned. A beat later he added, "Fanks Dad," because being grateful with a mouthful was considered okay where outright talking wasn't.

Dad shot him a chill smile before sipping his coffee and going back to his musical doodling. A minute later and he was humming the notes, stopping now and again to scratch something out and hum the change. It was comfortable, especially when Lion hopped up onto the bench beside him and rubbed his muzzle against Steven, which was Lion-talk for 'I can haz lunch meat?'

Steven ate one-handed while alternately petting and feeding little treats to his cat. Dad hummed. Lion purred, curling up against the side of Steven's blanket-cape.

It was nice.

Then the door opened, the bus tilted slightly to the right, and Steven saw Mom step inside, bags in her arms.

Steven swallowed heavily and pulled his blanket-cape a little tighter around him, a disturbance which irked Lion until another morsel of thinly sliced turkey was passed down to him.

"Want some tea, Starlight?" asked Dad, already getting up from the booth.

"That'd be great, hun. How about the goji berry white?" called mom as she shut the door. She set the bags down near the front of the bus, and doffed her winter jacket and scarf.

"Honey for my honey?" quipped Dad.

"Lots," was her reply, and she gave him a peck on the cheek.

There were bags under her eyes that Steven didn't remember being there and her smile didn't make it far up her face, but she leaned into the booth and offered him a side hug before sliding into the seat opposite him where Dad had been a little earlier.

Mom was a notorious warm spot stealer, almost as bad as Lion.

While Steven nibbled anxiously on some cubes of cantaloupe, Mom looked down at Dad's doodling, humming the tune herself, once as Dad had written it and then again as an accompanying harmony. She didn't look up until Dad slid a steaming mug of tea in front of her, sitting down beside her.

For a long minute everyone just focused on their drinks or food.

Tummy feeling a little churn-y, Steven stroked Lion and asked in a hesitant tone, "So... just how grounded am I?" He met his parents' eyes but only barely.

Mom started to open her mouth but stopped, looking at Dad who had apparently placed a hand on her leg under the table. Dad gave a weak smile and said, "We don't want to punish you, Shtu-ball..."

Some more parent telepathy and/or under-the-table leg squeezes passed and then Dad said, "...though you really worried the heck out of us. And Connie. And the Crystal Gems..."

He shook his head and finished with, "But the first thing we need to do is get everyone on the same page. We love you, bud, and we want to know what you're getting up to these days." He took a sip of coffee. "I'm pretty sure there's a thing or two you forgot to tell us about."

Steven squirmed in his seat, one hand going to fiddle with hearing aids he not only didn't have but hadn't worn for months now. "Maybe one or two," conceded the teen.

Mom blew on her steeping tea then set it back down and leaned forward a little. "Do you remember what I told you when you were about to go on your first mission with the gems?"

It was when the gems had wanted to take Steven to Connie's mother's sanctuary, because Connie was deaf and none of them knew sign language.

Steven nodded and swallowed, saying guiltily, "Magic was fine, but not secrets."

Her gaze still locked on him, she said, "That's right. And you..." Her voice had started to rise but Dad did his under-the-table thing.

Steven wasn't sure if it was years of meetings with record labels and industry lawyers that had led his parents to learn how to communicate while sitting side-by-side with their hands hidden, or if that was just something all parents did. A lot of his friends around Beach City didn't have two parents living at home so he hadn't been able to ask them about this particular mystery.

Using a milder tone instead, Mom said, "That's right. Magic is fine. You can even go on adventures... within reason. But secrets are not okay." She reached out and gave his wrist a comforting squeeze, a wan smile on her face. "So no more secrets." Her squeeze tightened a little. "Please."

She withdrew her hand, her eyes kind of sad.

“Where do you want me to start?” asked Steven, a little meekly.

“How about the beginning, bud,” said Dad.

Steven nodded, finishing off his juice since his mouth was feeling a little dry all of the sudden. "Okay. So, uh, things didn't go quite as good as I said they did on that first mission. See, there's this thing Connie has to do to keep her mother's sanctuary place working right, and if she doesn't then it starts spilling bad vibes all over the place, but Connie didn't know that at first so when we got there..."

* * *

Cafe Universe didn't officially open that night. When it started to get dark, Dad grabbed his wallet and went out to talk to one of the cleanup worker bosses. Steven didn't know what he said, but a little over an hour later a truck came back with a whole lot of take-out, enough for the cleanup workers and the mayor and Aunt Vidalia and Yellowtail and Onion and also the Universes, though Mom, Dad, and Steven stayed at the dining room table and talked.

The news about the Cluster was… tense. Steven knew the Crystal Gems were going to save the day but it took Mom and Dad a little time to be less shouty. Not the argument kind of shouty, but the ‘aaah!’ and ‘ohcrapohcrapohcrap!’ kind.

When Steven pointed out that he had kinda sorta discovered the Cluster for the Crystal Gems and therefore he’d helped stop the Earth getting kerblewied, that’d led to Mom calling a time-out so she could make some _seriously_ sweet tea and do some thinking. Ultimately she was glad Steven had helped save the world but she admitted she was kind of upset that it had to be _him_ to do it. Dad had stepped in and done his Mom-whisperer thing, saying that saving the world was great and they were all in favor of that, but if it was ever possible for the world to get saved while, say, one of the gems did it instead of Steven, that’d make them both a lot happier.

Steven said he’d try and stay second in line for saving the world when he could.

Things continued from there, but only after a dessert break. It was getting kind of close to bedtime when they finished, both the talking and the rhubarb pie Dad had ordered. After doing a little parent huddle, Mom asked if Connie would like to come over. She said that she and Dad were going to go for a little drive in the van but that they could bring Connie by before they left.

Steven fired off a quick text to Connie, who replied back immediately that she'd be at the Big Donut parking lot in time to meet them.

* * *

He'd spent half the day in bed and the other half at the dining room table, so when Connie showed up, Steven had moved to the couch in the living room.

The couch itself wasn't very deep because there had to be room for it, the entertainment center, as well as the walkway that went from the front of the bus to the back of the bus. However, the couch was wide --it needed to be to fit everyone for family movie nights; Mom, Dad, and Steven weren't exactly small-- and Connie had once mentioned how comfy it was.

The door opened and Connie climbed the steps up, turning to say, "Thanks for the ride." Someone said something which Connie nodded at and she answered, "Sure, but I can walk home if I have to so you don't need to-" Another nod. "Okay. Thanks again. Bye!"

As soon as the doors swung closed behind her, Connie nearly ran the rest of the way to Steven, though she slowed to a stop a few feet away, hands suddenly going to play with a sleeve of her winter coat. Cheeks flushed from cold or awkwardness, she said, "Hey Steven."

Steven smiled, if not as widely as he might usually. "Hi Connie. Want me to take your coat?" He'd prepared snacks: popcorn, fruit slices, some mixed nuts (though Steven had eaten most of the pecans already); he'd even tapped into his candy stash so they had gummy bears and jelly beans available.

Connie shook her head and slid the coat off. "No, that's fine." Looking to him for guidance, she tossed it on the back of the couch where he pointed. She wrung her hands. "So, uh, how bad is it?" A beat. "With your parents, I mean."

Slowly, kind of like Lion when he thought that a pet carrier and a vet appointment might be waiting for him, Connie entered the 'room' and sat down on the opposite end of the couch.

Steven made sure the snacks were in easy reach for her before answering. "It's kinda bad," he admitted and Connie winced. "But not, like, kinda really bad," he added hastily. "I'm going to be helping the cleanup crews a lot starting tomorrow, or helping the mayor with city stuff if they don't need me that day."

"I could work with you," offered Connie quickly. She seemed to feel self-conscious after that and hastily grabbed a handful of popcorn. "I mean, the gems and I have been doing that some anyway so it's not like it'd be that different."

Steven smiled warmly, little tingly feelings fluttering in his tummy as he looked at her. "That'd be really cool," he said after realizing he'd been staring. “But they start really early and you’re not a morning person like I am, so it’d be okay if you helped out later in the day.”

The quiet stretched out and Steven reached up to scratch the back of his head. "What else did Mom and Dad decide? Um, less video games and movies. More helping Mom with the shop when it's open again. And helping Dad in the sound studio; Sour Cream wants to start recording a new single after he's back from touring."

"That's neat," said Connie, pulling her legs up to her chest. With a small mound of popcorn balanced in her left hand, she was doing that cute thing where she'd use her right to eat the popcorn one kernel at a time. _Munch-munch-munch._ When she was done she wiped her mouth on her sleeve, reached for more, and asked, "Anything else?"

_Can you still do Crystal Gem stuff?_ the Connie that lived in his head wondered.

"Mom said that all of this scares the bejeebus out of her, but that she felt less scared when I was doing gem things with you." He sat up a little straighter, reaching for something to eat before thinking better of it. He wasn't actually hungry; eating was just comforting. "So I'm allowed to go on some missions, but only when Mom and Dad know all the details, and only when you know all the details and are going too."

Connie nibbled through her popcorn quickly --_munch-munch-munch_\-- and said softly, "That... doesn't seem that bad."

Steven nodded and smiled, happy even if a part of his insides still felt like a block of ice.

"She apologized to me," said Connie, clutching her knees to her chest. "While you were still asleep, your mom came by the Beach House and said she was sorry for shouting at me. She said it wasn't really my fault, that she was frightened and angry at the situation in general and was just lashing out at Lapis and me because we were there."

"I'm glad," and Steven was. Connie regularly faced down monsters and stuff but moms were a special kind of scary.

"Yeah, it was a nice gesture," agreed Connie while having a hard time finding where to place her hands.

“Oh, Dad asked after your dad and Priyanka and I realized I didn’t really have much news about them,” said Steven, because silence was kinda terrifying right now for some reason. “How are they?”

Connie shrugged. “Dad’s staying at Priyanka’s house until the town is reopened. Pri’s flying back from her conference in Kansas City tonight, actually. Well, technically really early tomorrow. I told Dad about the Cluster and he got kind of quiet for a while but then said he was really glad the Crystal Gems were on the case and left it at that.”

“Panic after he hung up?” guessed Steven.

“Oh, definitely,” answered Connie.

Steven nodded companionably and considered what to say next and it wasn’t that he had nothing to talk about, but he had nothing he wasn’t scared to talk about so he just kind of hummed and nodded for a while feeling like a doofus, worrying his lip while Connie couldn’t settle on anywhere to look and started chewing the inside of her cheek.

A long, awkward silence stretched out and it was exactly as terrifying as he’d thought. 

"I'm sorry," they both said at once followed by each looking at the other with surprise.

"You go-" // "I didn't- You can-" Steven and Connie started to say before lapsing into silence again.

They stared like dueling gunslingers for a beat before each hurrying to put a finger to their nose. Connie was quicker on the draw --she usually was-- which was why when she said with a smile, "You go ahead," Steven was bound by Destiny Partner law to do exactly that.

"I'm sorry for making you worry so much," and Steven repositioned himself so that he was sitting sideways on the couch, looking Connie directly in the eyes. "I had hoped the secret mission would be over before you knew about it so that I could just tell you and the gems where Amethyst and P2 were, but that's not what happened, like, at all, and I made you and Mom and Dad and Lapis super worried." Without consciously intending to, he grab a snack, chewed, swallowed. "Sorry," he repeated.

Connie fidgeted in place but her gaze stayed on Steven. "Why did you go on that mission in the first place?" She blinked. "No, that's the wrong question. Rather, why did you try to keep it a secret? I would have helped you. The gems too."

"If you helped me then-" Steven stopped and frowned, the words in his head not matching the feelings in his tummy. Another comfort snack happened while he puzzled this over.

"You know that episode of _Avatar: The Last Airbender_ where there's a forest fire and all the benders rush over to put it out with their magic and Sokka is like, 'What should I do?' and they say, 'Oh, uh, keep an eye on Momo,' so Sokka..." He trailed off under the weight of Connie's stare.

"Steven," she said with equal parts sympathy and frustration. "You're not the team regular like Sokka. And besides, the point of that episode was how Sokka was really important even without flashy bending moves."

She looked like she was going to continue but Steven had held up a palm. Signing a quick apology for interrupting, Connie gestured for him to continue.

"You're right but there's, like, levels,” he explained. “In the final fight of the show, Toph and Sokka fought soldiers on a blimp," and he held his palm out flat a few inches over the couch cushions.

Raising it up a little higher, he said, "Then you had Zuko and Katara fighting Azula in a big water-fire-lightning battle."

The hand went up higher still. "And then you had Aang go all super-Avatar in his fight against the Fire Lord. I know I help the team, but if someone from a higher level helped Wolf and me find Amethyst and P2, it wouldn't be them helping us, it'd be us helping them."

Connie's face scrunched up, clearly not agreeing. "But that's not how it works at all. I mean, Lapis is the most powerful Crystal Gem in most circumstances but that doesn't mean she's the leader or even the one who contributes the most on a given mission. And it's not a competition anyway. We're keeping the world safe, or trying to, and that's more important than some kind of ranking system."

"Then why wasn't I able to help save the world when the handship attacked?" asked Steven, the words tumbling out of his mouth, no thinking required.

Connie's expression shifted from confident to not in front of his very eyes, her mouth opening to speak but nothing came out.

Steven nodded, more to himself than to her. "Levels," he insisted. "It would have been dangerous to make Sokka fight the Fire Lord. Ozai would have shot him with lightning or exploded him with a fireball or just flown too high for Sokka to hit him with his boomerang and ignored him. Ozai," and he held his palm out at about chest height. "Sokka," and he lowered it almost to his lap. "Handship," and his palm was up to his chest again.

He'd just started lowering it back down when Connie interrupted.

"It's not like that at all!" she protested.

Steven's eyebrows rose in surprise. "It's not?"

"No, of course not," she insisted, running a hand through her hair, eyes roving the living room as she thought hurriedly. "I mean, I've been thinking about it over and over again. 'What if Steven had been there? What if we'd fused into Asmi? Could we have won? Could we have beaten Rose decisively instead of sort of fighting her to a draw in space?'"

A snack had appeared in Steven's hand somehow but his hand paused on its way to his mouth so he could ask, wide-eyed, "And?"

Connie pulled another face, not at Steven this time but at the situation. "I- I don't know. Maybe?" her voice inflecting up, heavy with uncertainty.

Steven relaxed a little, surprise cooling into resignation. "Or I could have gotten blown up or stabbed or gone kablooie when the handship crashed."

"I- But-" Connie looked frustrated and helpless and a little mad all at once.

Steven reached for the phone in his pocket. It was his phone, but it wasn't the phone he'd taken on his secret team mission because that one was still with P2 in some kind of limb enhancer-y, super-science lockdown. However, back when Steven had started training with Jasper and going on missions, Mom and Dad had made a point to buy an identical replacement phone and ensured all of his data was configured to be backed up wirelessly. "I break a phone just sitting down wrong," Dad had joked, "no monster-fighting needed." In fact given Dad's shopping habits, Steven suspected that in a box on some shelf somewhere there were replacement phones for his replacement phone.

As such, part of his day with his parents had involved them giving him the phone he was now pulling from his pocket so he could scroll to a section of his and Connie's chat history. _That_ section of their chat history; he could spot it just from the general outline of the sentences, he'd read it so many times.

Turning the phone around where Connie could read it, he showed her:  
_* CoMa - 05:52pm | They might not want to kill us in the fight because we're gems._  
_* CoMa - 05:53pm | They might want to capture us if we lose. But they don't care about humans, Steven._  
_* CoMa - 05:53pm | Your not a person to them, just an animal or an infestation._  
_* CoMa - 05:54pm | They'll kill you._

In his mind he heard Connie's voice reciting the words of the texts even as the real Connie's eyes moved, reading the words to herself.

She got to the end and wilted. Reaching out, she gently lowering his hand holding the phone so she didn't have to look at it more.

"See?" he said in a whisper, setting his phone facedown on the couch between them, his voice apologetic but accusatory at the same time.

Connie wilted further. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep, deep breath, slowly letting the air back out. He recognized it as something Peedee would do sometimes so he guessed it was something they'd learned from Dr. Brooks.

A few more breaths followed and then Connie opened her eyes, back straightening, her expression calm. "Okay. I don't want this to be the reality of the situation, but, yes, it was almost certainly a good thing you weren't at the invasion fight. You-" and her voice trembled a little but she continued, "-might have gotten seriously hurt or even killed, and it's possible the fight would have been just as big of a mess without you there but a billion times worse of a loss because you'd be a casualty."

Steven knew that 'casualty' didn't just mean 'dead' --If a soldier only got hurt they were still a casualty-- but he couldn't help but flinch all the same.

Looking all calm and articulate, Connie kept going. "But imagine for a second if P2 had tried to capture me or Jasper or Lapis?"

_Huh?_

Steven was surprised to find he was in the middle of chewing up some jelly beans when he started to reply. When had he eaten those?

Swallowing and shaking his head slightly, he said, "Um, you would have kicked P2's butt. Amethyst might have gotten away, she's _really_ good at shapeshifting, but you'd have won."

Was Connie agreeing with him about his Sokka-ness? He wasn't sure how he felt about that now that it was actually happening.

She nodded. "Yeah, we would have beaten P2 and poofed her. But then we'd still be thinking the Cluster was Rose's term for Pink Diamond's shards instead of being literally the single most dangerous and important threat to the planet."

Steven shook his head. "You would have let her out of the bubble eventually. She's not nearly as dangerous without her-" and he paused, loudly thinking an apology to Miss Peridot. "-Without her limb enhancers," he eventually finished.

"Yeah, but she wouldn't tell us the facts. We're rebel scum. And remember, pretty much the same thing happened to Mom-" Connie's eyes went wide and she cleared her throat, a blush forming. "With Peridot."

A smile blossomed across Steven's face.

Connie's lips thinned, her blush deepening.

Steven's smile grew brighter.

"Steven," Connie said warningly but she was having trouble keeping a serious expression on her face.

"You called her 'Mom!'" he exclaimed, instantly joyous. It was like _Crying Breakfast Friends_: everyone might be crying but there was always that beautiful moment when characters realized how much they meant to each other and _it was wonderful!_

Gaze lowering, Connie lost the fight against her smile. "Yeah, I did," she conceded bashfully.

Steven squeed.

"And she calls me her daughter when it's just the two of us-"

_"Eeeeh!"_

She looked up and wagged her finger sternly at Steven even as she was grinning. "-And it's beautiful and _completely not the point right now,"_ she stressed. She held his gaze, expression (mostly) serious for the long seconds it took for Steven to come down from his emotional high.

_It's just. So. Perfect!_ he thought so loudly she could probably hear it. Slowly his smile shrank to being merely wide.

"Remember, pretty much the same thing happened with Mom-" and Connie met his eyes, daring him to react... but he managed to keep his squee on the inside this time. "-When she was first brought to Earth. Even captured and without her enhancers she found a way to poof Jasper and nearly contacted Yellow Diamond. So, no, I don't think P2 would have cooperated with us. Certainly not in the timeframe needed. The Cluster has been on Earth for thousands of years and we never discovered it. Mom and I even spent days working in the Kindergarten control room and no one realized there was some buried doomsday weapon waiting to wake up. And with Rose Quartz out there, we certainly weren't going to go looking now!"

Sobering, Steven asked, "What are you saying?"

"I'm saying," and Connie scooched forward a little so she could rest a hand on his knee. "Even though we were all worried sick, we wouldn't have succeeded if you hadn't gone on your mission without us. Not to the same degree. Certainly not 'getting the villain to monologue her evil plan'-levels of success."

"I- But- Mainly I was just being nice," he said, confused both by the turn in the conversation as well as the fact that he was somehow arguing against himself. "It wasn't that big of a win," he insisted.

"Steven," said Connie in a flat voice, a sardonic cast to her features. "You turned capture into a trip for desserts and some silly Instabrag photos. No other Crystal Gem- probably no other _person,_ could have done that."

The photo booth photos had gotten a lot more likes than most of the others on his feed. Probably because Ronaldo had linked to them in his blog.

The two of them stared at one another, each sitting a lot closer to the other than they'd been at the start of the conversation.

Steven reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. "So what does this mean?"

Connie blinked, looking a little abashed herself. "Yeah, the moral on this one isn't as clean-cut as I originally expected."

Agreeing, Steven said, "We both ditched the other and ended up helping save the world. Do we go on more missions alone?" he said, his unhappy tone of voice making it clear how he felt about that idea.

Connie shook her head. "No. That'd be a bad idea... except in those really weird situations when it's not."

_Plus, Mom would kill me,_ Steven silently added.

Connie was looking past Steven, eyes narrowed in thought. "No," she repeated. "I think the point is that we need to be flexible. War is complicated and not every challenge should be met with all seven of the Crystal Gems ready to fight," but she didn't sound entirely convinced.

Steven worried his lip because it still didn't feel right for him either...

Then an idea blossomed behind his eyes and he wouldn't have been surprised if a little light bulb lit up over his head. "Okay, but we still have to communicate. Talk about it first. Even if it was right, it still felt really bad when you..." and he trailed off.

His girlfriend --and he finally could relax that part of him that had been scared to call her that in case she wasn't anymore by the end of their talk-- nodded somberly. "And I was so confused and upset when I learned what you and Wolf had been doing." The hand on his knee offered a small squeeze of comfort. "I think we both felt abandoned."

He nodded, signing his agreement for emphasis.

“But none of this ‘levels’ business,” she insisted in a soft-spoken sort of way. “Some of us are better suited for certain missions than others but it doesn’t make anyone the dud of the group.” She pouted as she tried to organize her thoughts.

“Maybe it’s like roles,” offered Steven. “Like in _Lutes and Loots?_ Todd does crowd control, Samwise does melee tanking, Roland buffs and heals, and Carella does a bit of everything plus is all smart about tactics.”

His girlfriend nodded, smiling. “I like that a lot better.” A beat. “Jasper probably would too. I just hate the idea of you being down on yourself, because you _are_ important. I hated it while you were gone, even when I didn’t know anything dangerous was afoot.”

Connie flushed a little and said in a quieter voice, "I really missed you."

Steven moved his phone and the bowls of treats aside and scooched closer, feeling a little tingly from their closeness. "Me too," and it was almost hard to speak when a wave of _really wanting to be next to her_ rolled through him. It was like when you suddenly went from fine to starving without any warning in-between.

They pulled each other into a tight hug.

"Even if it worked out, in a weird sort of way this time," murmured Steven into the side of Connie's neck, "I'd still rather save the world with you."

Her answering squeeze-y hug was agreement enough.

"I'm sorry," they once again said at the same time. Instead of trying to be the first to touch their finger to their nose, Connie nuzzled against Steven's neck and Steven ran his fingers through her soft hair.

Finally Steven pulled back just enough he could see her beautiful face, a big, dumb grin spreading across his face. Connie smiled back at him, her cheeks flushed. More or less at the same time they each reached up and then wiggled the other's nose.

_It'll be okay,_ they were telling the other.

Then Steven leaned in and gave her an Eskimo kiss, rubbing his nose against hers. Connie giggled, then tilted her head up and gave him a kiss, the regular kind though it felt anything but regular to him. He kissed her back and for a while his world was just him and Connie and it was perfect.

Sitting with her legs draped over his lap, her hands twined behind his neck, and her head resting on his shoulder, Connie said in a sly voice, "You know what else I've really missed?"

Steven nuzzled and kissed the top of her head. His voice was relaxed, the block of ice that had been in his tummy melted by the warm, happy glow filling him. "What's that?"

For a few seconds she was doing something he couldn't see because moving his head would have meant changing anything about right now, which was not allowed, it was too comfy and too perfect. Then he heard the start of a familiar song and he felt icy-hot excitement race through him.

She turned and grinned at him as a chipper mix of electronic notes, acoustic guitar, and drum beats played on her phone. An eyebrow went up in invitation.

It was a little tricky dancing in the bus but they were too happy to care. Steven bumped into the entertainment center, the TV wobbling and they chuckled. Then Connie stumbled, Steven tried to keep her upright, and both of them toppled onto the narrow couch, giggling helplessly after it was clear no one was hurt.

There was a yellow glow, a flash of light, and then one person was laughing, splayed messily but happily across the couch cushions.

"Ah, I like this couch," said Asmi through a smile, nuzzling the cushy material with their cheek. "And it's wide enough for me too." They stretched like a cat and gave a contented sigh, interrupted only by the occasional giggle.

"Good talk," they said, one arm groping around blindly until it grabbed Connie's winter coat and draped it over themself like a blanket. Snuggling into a good position Asmi wrapped their arms around themself, half self-hug, half arm-pillow, and laid there. "Very good talk," they mumbled with languid contentment.

When Steven's parents came back from their drive they found Connie and Steven spooning contentedly on the couch, asleep and smiling.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I'd split up this epilogue into two chapters, the second chapter would have been called 'A Connversation'.
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you have a Connie Swap story burning in your soul that you want to see in our official, curated Omake collection, drop us a comment either in the Omake fic or here in the main fic and we'll get in touch.
> 
> Connie Swap has an official Discord for the fans. [Come check it out.](https://discord.gg/RQMDdhr)
> 
> As usual, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments and your asks at the [Connie Swap Tumblr](http://connieswap.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


	9. Lapis Epilogue

Girlie had left so Mamaverse and Papaverse could pick her up; a good thing too, because she'd been super distracted all day long. Lapis, as a master of the art of Not Thinking About It, had taken it upon herself to keep her occupied but between Pinkie's possible mega-grounding and that whole 'planet-buster made of nightmare fuel', even Lapis' mastery and a box set of classic _Looney Tunes_ wasn't enough.

There wasn't an actual dog house for Wolf to be in, but he managed to act the part anyway by moping around and being surprisingly good at staying out of sight for being giant and yellow. Con-con had sat with him a little but he probably wouldn't be his usual self until Steven was able to prove he hadn't been buried alive under a Mary-lanche.

OJ was in her room of the temple, having patrolled with BM most of the day so the two could communicate by punching stuff or whatever they did together. Just as well they'd gone out given how much Skittles needed to be caught up on, and how much stuff she would want to wreck after hearing it all. OJ had gone to her room after getting back while BM had left for her forge 'to start working on drill parts and to finish my new look.'

Something about needing some armor to complete her new getup.

Lapis was looking forward to seeing it, something she'd never admit to the smith's face, but she'd pranked a couple of the smith's things in the forge while she'd been poofed. Stopping by to see if Doug's dye pack had done its job was a good excuse to visit without having to admit she cared.

But the reason Lapis was still laying on Connie's bed while Bugs played matador onscreen was because Peri was home too. They needed to talk and she wanted to and didn't want to at the same time. Dot was using Citrine's holosuite to unlock that data crystal thing because sometimes the green cutie's life really did sound like an episode of _Star Trek._

Imagining her in a Lieutenant Uhura outfit --The 60s version was the best as far as Lapis was concerned; the amazingly bad uniforms was just part of its charm-- helped kill another twenty or so minutes while Lapis put the 'pro' in 'procrastination'.

Then the temple door opened --Lapis' mind adding the campy 'whoosh' sound effect without prompting-- and Peri staggered out looking... She was green, obviously, but here she was also green in the 'gonna hurl' sense.

Putting the colorful slapstick on pause, Lapis got up and winged down from the loft. "What's up, Dot?" she asked before realizing where that'd come from. _No, bad Lapis. This is the time to be neither looney nor tuney._

Peri hobbled over and flopped down on the couch, staring at nothing in particular. Meanwhile, Wolf slunk across the living room to go hide in the kitchen. Somehow he even managed to eat kibble apologetically, which Lapis found both strange and strangely impressive.

Sitting down a little ways from Peri, Lapis sat and waited. Waiting sucked, though, so mainly she played the game of 'mentally sing the _Merrie Melodies_ song without also humming it.'

A surprisingly hard game to win, in fact.

Sitting up a little, Dot's eyes fluttered and she seemed to notice Lapis for the first time. "Laz?"

Lapis found a grin and gave a little wave. "That's me."

"I'm disturbed," and without saying further, she scooched over and laid her head on Lapis' lap, eyes wide and staring, probably because looking at the walls was better than what was waiting for her to see behind her eyelids.

On reflex Lapis starting to stroke Dot's hair with her right hand, the left resting on the gem's hip and offering the occasional soft pat. _What the heck was on that crystal?_ she thought loudly.

There were all kinds of things that could annoy P-pod or that weren't her cup of green tea, but very little actually grossed her out. Kindergartner certification and raising Connie from baby to teen had seen to that.

Unlike Dot, diapers and the stuff inside injectors both squicked the heck out of Lapis.

"You wanna share the ick-factor?" invited Lapis after another minute of stroking and silence.

"Shards," said Dot in a hushed tone. "She works with shards."

"Eh?" replied Lapis, eloquent as ever.

Peri drew her short little knees in, a part of Lapis still surprised by how... compact she really was. "The data crystal didn't contain mission details regarding the Cluster. In fact, no mention of the Cluster or a forced fusion of unusually large scale was made at all. Instead I found the... logs of the enemy Peridot's regarding reconstituting a shattered individual using multiple individuals... as parts."

Lapis let that sink in for a second. There'd been that freaky Biggs-Pearl they'd fought, the one that’d kicked Lapis out of the metaphorical sandbox when she'd tried to use the hose on it. The gemstone... gemstones? The thing they'd bubbled had been something she didn't want to look at but also _couldn't not_ look at because it'd been too horrifically captivating.

Humans weren't the only species guilty of rubbernecking past an accident.

And Dot had spent the last couple of hours reading P2's cookbook of horrors. _Talk about your recipe for disaster,_ Bugs quipped wryly in Lapis' mind, snacking on a carrot. Then he thought better of the carrot, stuffing it into a suitcase that had 'Pismo Beach or Bust' stenciled on the side, and said, _Actually, count me outta this. You're on your own, Mac._ Digging a tunnel with exaggerated speed and a chainsaw sound effect, a small mound of dirt sped hastily away in the cartoon of Lapis' imagination.

Then she remembered that most of Dot's logs had audio and video as well. Lapis made a little whimpering noise without intending to.

Peri nodded in her lap. "Indeed. It was-" She swallowed. "-Fascinating, albeit in a deeply morbid fashion. And given the nature of the threat the Steven uncovered, I felt compelled to... delve as much as I was able."

Lapis leaned in and cradled Dot as much as she could given the positions they were in. "Oh, Dot. You shouldn't- I mean, if OJ had to eat a burger to save the Earth, she'd do it, but this is like her going to a buffet dumpster for the appetizer. Don't do that to yourself."

Peri shook her head, still resting in Lapis' lap. "An amusing analogy but a flawed one."

The blue gem huffed and rolled her eyes. "Not really the point, you dork, but fine. Was it at least... worth it? Do you know how we're going to stop this Cluster thing?"

"Not without more specifics on its arrangement and structure, no. But I can say with confidence that reconstituting the shattered Pink Diamond from her shards is an objective of the invaders, if possibly just a secondary one." Stretching out, Peridot gently waved Lapis away and rose to a seated position. "I can think of no other, compelling explanation for bringing a technician with that training into this situation."

That was the thing with Dot: no matter what happened to her, she never sat still for long. She'd sulk or cry or watch crappy TV for a while but then she'd be back up and back to work. It was like, if she couldn't fix herself then she could at least fix the microwave and a couple of sensor towers instead.

It was something Lapis had always admired about her.

"Well, we sure as schist aren't going to hand those over," said Lapis, forcing confidence into her voice, "so you don't need to go for a second swim through the pool of nightmares."

Peri smiled at her but it didn't reach her eyes. "I sincerely hope so but I'm afraid you mistake the nature of my revulsion."

"Huh?" More of that famous Lazuli eloquence.

"This Peridot worked on a station similar to the one you found me on. Her duties and mine had considerable overlap. And as I was reading her logs, she mentioned her pride and enthusiasm at being singled out by our-" Dot gave a sad shake of her head. "At being singled out by her Diamond for this very specific training for this very prestigious assignment. And it was impossible not to empathize. The field in question is cutting-edge, an outgrowth of the most advanced gemetic research going on in the empire. The techniques are fascinating once you distance yourself from the unsavory nature of the specimens. And the ultimate prize, of being _the_ Peridot to not only inspect a Diamond's gemstone but to _restore it?_" She gave a shuddering sigh that was equal parts revulsion and desire.

Lapis should probably have been a good... girlfriend? Gal pal? Coworker with benefits? Even when things had been going well, she and Peri had never talked labels. Whatever she was, she should have been a good one of those and objected, countered with something uplifting and affirming of her green sweetie, but she'd lost the reins on this conversation a while back and was just hanging on.

Dot continued. "Laz, I hate this gem. I hate her for the misguided allegiance she holds, for the mission she's attempting to carry out, and for the tools at her disposal with which to do so."

Without realizing it, one small, green hand reached over to rub the opposite arm. 

"But I see so much of myself in her that I must also hate myself in the process, because it was circumstance more than character that separate she and I. One of us was abducted to Earth, the other was sent centuries later on a mission." Dot looked somberly at Lapis for a beat before, expression growing wild, she gestured to her forehead and wailed, "Our stones even have the same cut!"

That was enough to jolt Lapis into action. "Sorry, Dot, but I ain't buying it. As far as I'm concerned you two are leagues apart. For one, you're a green sweetie while that Peridot is not so much a tool as a whole toolbox."

_No, I'm not bitter about that Moissanite field, why do you ask?_

"And for another, everyone was just one order from their Diamond away from doing something nasty. That's Homeworld, where the shards of all the conscientious objectors were used to fill White Diamond's bean bag chair. No one was innocent there, just lucky." She scrounged a smile and shot Dot a wink that was inappropriate in more ways than one. “So don’t go dissing yourself for getting lucky.”

Peridot’s expression was a thing of beauty, for a sufficiently snarky definition thereof.

Lapis shook her long hair and said, "Hey, let's change the subject to something differently awful."

Dot gave Lapis a searching look. "Differently awful?"

“Yeah, less awful but still not great.” Lapis took a deep breath and bowled forward. "It's about your recent spate of Tigger Time. We-"

Peridot was already hopping down from the couch. "No. An emphatic 'no thank you,' in fact. That Jasper and I have chosen to optimize our shared patrols to a degree you feel uncomfortable with is not something I'm inclined to discuss."

She then started to hobble toward the temple door, prompting Lapis to blurt out, "Wait, you'd rather go study that horror show than talk with me? About _this?"_

If so, that wasn't a cutting remarking on Dot’s part, it was a frickin' decapitation.

Peri’s expression softened a little and she shook her head. "No, that was not my meaning. I'm returning to Citrine's holographic suite so I can begin experimenting with different designs for the drill mechanism. I don't-" She hesitated and then shook her head again. "Perhaps when things are less urgent then we can discuss the matter further."

Before Lapis could reply, Peridot willed the temple door open and hobble-marched through it, a wash of yellow interior vanishing as the door closed behind her.

Lapis sat there, stunned, staring at where Dot used to be. "Th-Th-Th-That's all, folks!" she said with fake cheer and then slumped against the couch.

For a time Lapis fell into a familiar loop of bad-mouthing herself and everyone else, loudly, in the space of her own thoughts, all while mentally reenacting what'd just happened.

She'd just started giving serious consideration to finding a buffet (or an uncharted island) to demolish when she heard a small voice in her mind pointing something out. That small voice sounded like Con-con, which Lapis had learned was pretty good to listen to as voices went.

_It takes two to fuse,_ she was saying.

Lapis blinked and turned to look at the temple door. The orange stone set in the four-point star stared back at her.

"Yeah, you're right. Why the heck is OJ being so fusion-happy these days anyway?" she asked the empty room.

A yellow head peered around the kitchen divider before vanishing back behind it.

_The_ mostly _empty room,_ she corrected, adding, _Got any more good advice, my inner Con-con?_

In her mind Lapis saw a chibi Connie with wings and a halo, a shoulder angel who glanced at her feathers in surprise and then shot Lapis a skeptical look. _How about you stop stealing Connie's Pocky?_ and she crossed adorably stubby arms across her chest.

_Make those little sticks less delicious and you've got yourself a deal,_ quipped Lapis inwardly, sitting upright so she could summon her wings without getting the couch damp.

Winging across the living room, Lapis added, _But full points for the OJ tip. Here, go have some fun while I'm busy,_ and a cartoon airline ticket that had 'Pismo Beach' printed across it in large letters appeared in the chibi Connie's hand.

The temple door opened on a sandstone Kindergarten at twilight, all while Lapis' imagination was waving goodbye to the departing Connie figment. The door closed behind her and all was silent. Utterly still and silent.

As unnerving as it was, Lapis had to agree it was just about the most Jasper thing possible. Heck, the walls were even orange and striped.

Rather than fly, Lapis walked through the vast and dimly lit room in the temple. It gave her time to get her game face on but mainly it let her take in the sights. Jasper's room had been barred to all others for thousands of years and it was novel being in there, even for someone as old as Lapis.

Walking silently across the dry and dusty ground, Lapis looked from emergence hole to emergence hole, nearly half showing the outline of Quartzes who were far from the ideal. And then she rounded a corner and there was the hole by which all others were measured, the ideal realized and in the unlikeliest of places.

Jasper had beaten long odds just popping out, and had never stopped fighting them; especially not after turning rebel. Lapis could appreciate that, she'd even admired it once, back when the two of them were the darlings of the Rebellion, the pair who put the 'power' in 'power couple,' forming a fusion even more infamous than Garnet.

Not that Lapis had been especially proud of that these last few millennia.

Jasper herself was standing in front of her hole, because the gem exemplifying endurance didn't need to sit, she just did it to be polite around others. She was standing and reading from a big book of Connie's. Something about a companion, if Lapis remembered correctly.

She looked up and gave Lapis a polite head tilt before returning to her story.

In the iconic hole over Japser's head, Lapis saw yellow bubbles. Including three with pink shards in them. Walking a little faster, Lapis approached but her gaze was raised. "I wonder why she used three bubbles?" she asked, there being absolutely no need to clarify who 'she' was.

With exaggerated care, Jasper slid a bookmark in the book and set the tome delicately aside, shelving it beside a couple of other books in a chest-height emergence hole-turned-bookshelf. Maybe it was a collector's edition or something, because Lapis could remember Con-con being super careful with that book too.

"She said it was for ease of negotiation," explained the Quartz. "She made four bubbles, one she left behind for Homeworld so they'd know what had happened, who had done it. The other three she stored here. If the Rebellion had risked defeat, she planned to meet with the Diamonds, one bubble in hand and the other two hidden where no one could find them. If things had gone badly, she thought it would be the only leverage left that the Diamonds would actually care about."

"Smart," said Lapis, distracted, her eyes on the bubbles once more. Knowing there were Diamond bits inside those gave her the heebie jeebies because her much-abused survival instinct still knew one lesson very firmly: stay _the heck away_ from the Diamonds.

Guess she could add Diamond shards up there with diapers and the stuff inside injectors.

The weight of Jasper's questioning stare pulled her out of her thoughts. Oh right, what she'd actually come here to do.

"I can't help but notice you and Dot have been awfully fuse-y lately," led the blue gem, her tone casual.

The Quartz tilted her head in wordless agreement, tossing in a grunt for good measure.

Right, she was dealing with OJ. Best just spit it out or she'd be here all night.

"Why the heck is that?" she asked, exasperation audible.

Jasper quirked her head to the side questioningly. "Fusion is allowed now."

Lapis blinked. "Eh?" she said, because apparently today was the day where all conversations took unexpected turns. Given her luck, if she tried to call in a pizza delivery she'd end up embroiled in a talk about evil twins or something.

"Fusion. It's okay." The Quartz paused as if debating something. Then, in a gentler voice, she said, "You enjoy it, don't you?"

She stared at the large gem and remembered, a thousand gravelly invitations to fuse flashing through her mind. Heck, OJ didn't even have to ask these days, they'd been through this song and lack-of-a-dance so many times. There was a look that the big gem could give her that said it all, bedroom eyes inviting her to the world's most dangerous slumber party. And, for a split-second before instinct forced her to shut that line of thought down _hard_, Lapis could remember how it felt, how intoxicatingly _awesome_ it was to offload all restraint to someone else, to be large and in charge and unstoppable and responsible for nothing, least of all herself.

Doug had told her once that the cars they used to teach students how to drive had two brake pedals, one for each person up front so that anyone could stop the car before it wrecked. Being Malachite was like that but with the driver-side brake removed and Lapis at the wheel. There was only the gas pedal and excitement, where all the property damage was Jasper’s fault.

Lapis' breath shuddered and she didn't trust herself to speak just then, instead nodding in wordless agreement while fighting down a flush of excitement and weapons-grade self-loathing.

"It's okay now," insisted Jasper. "Maybe not for us," and wasn't _that_ the understatement of the century, "but Tiger's Eye has always been safe."

Fighting down the booming, blue-green giant's laughter echoing her head, Lapis pressed her hands into her eyes and blew out a deep breath.

Once she could see again she pointed a finger at Jasper and said, "Well, news flash: she ain't anymore." Anger and self-loathing fueled the vitriol in her statement, a state of mind that was just so easy to get into when it was directed at Jasper. "Dot's using you because she's flipping out without her limb enhancers."

And a part of Lapis really hoped to see Jasper flinch, that the cut would hurt because if talking with the Quartz made Lapis not like herself then why not share the wealth? That Connie voice was back, was saying something warningly about things, but Lapis wasn't ready to listen just yet.

To her considerable disappointment, Jasper just shrugged, unphased. Dammit! Lapis was going to feel guilty regardless, and it was only with heaps of self-restraint she didn't double down to try and find her prize at the bottom of this cereal box of personal awfulness.

"I knew that," answered the Quartz, nonchalant.

_What?_

"It's okay because I'm using her too."

_...WHAT?!_

Lapis dropped back, letting her wings do the lifting like she was collapsing onto a fainting couch. She couldn't do it with the languid grace that Hiddenite would pull it off, but sometimes standing just wasn't in the cards.

She pinched the bridge of her nose and thought for a second as she hovered. Then she threw that thought out the window and said, eyes still closed, "Mind unpacking that one for me, OJ? It’s been _a day."_

Speaking slowly, as if explanating something simple to a dim pupil, Jasper said, "Connie fused with Steven and was in trouble. Then they showed that fusion could work for more than fighting without causing strife." She frowned. "And without taking it as far as Garnet." Expression returning to neutrality, she finished with, "We ended the punishment and said fusion was okay."

"I- Alright, but where does you using Dot come into this?" Lapis looked around at her calm but slightly unnerving surroundings before settling back on the calm but slightly unnerving Quartz instead. "Besides, you hate fusion!"

OJ's eyes narrowed but she otherwise didn't move. For long, looong seconds she didn't talk. It was only when Lapis was about to say something, what exactly she wasn't sure, that Jasper said in what for her was a quiet voice, "I don't hate fusion. Not really."

Blink-blink. Blink-blink. "Yes you do!" exclaimed Lapis, arms thrust over her head. "No one has been down on fusion as much as you. You fight Garnet constantly, you diss Hiddenite every time she shows up, and normally you and Dot form Tiger's Eye once a decade, _if that!_ What gives?"

OJ shook her head in disagreement. Then, in a quieter voice, she said, "I hate it because I enjoy it so much."

Lapis gave Jasper a _look_. Then, finally, she said, "So Dot comes to you obviously upset about being downsized and you think, 'She looks at me and sees a big, orange pair of limb enhancers, and I'm cool with that because I look at her and see a slightly less disastrous Malachite.' Is that in the right hemisphere?"

A pause then a gravelly, "Roughly."

"Aargh!" cried Lapis, the sound echoing off the canyon walls. "No wonder we always janked up fusion: calling us a garbage fire would be a diss on garbage fires."

One of Jasper's eyebrows rose, the Quartz being the one giving a _look_ this time.

"Oh, don't look at me with that tone of voice," snapped Lapis, lowering herself to her feet and wagging her finger at the gem. "Peri's in a really crappy spot right now and you enabling her isn't helping a darn thing. And that's before getting into _your_ effed up motivation."

Jasper's mouth became a line and she crossed her arms.

"Don't believe me?" challenged Lapis, pacing. "Pretend you're having this conversation with Connie instead, because the voice of her that lives in my head is saying _plenty._ Or imagine it was Asmi instead. I don't know 'em as well, but I know them well enough to know they'd tell you to pump the brakes. Hard."

That gave OJ pause, the gem's eyes growing distant as she stopped focusing on Lapis.

To give her space (and to keep from berating Jasper further, because it was hard for Lapis to stop once she got started), Lapis flew up to a large emergence hole that was nearly sideways and sat down, doing a gargoyle impression while the Quartz thought.

More than a minute passed.

Lapis was staring at the little striations in the hole wall and wondering if they matched what was in the real Beta Kindergarten. Just how accurate had OJ been able to make this place? She was pulled out of her musings when a voice below said, "She's upset. I was trying to help."

Leaving the mystery of the Beta-Beta Kindergarten aside, Lapis slid off the lip of the hole and dropped down, flapping her wings once to kill her fall and land gently. "How do you figure?" she pressed.

OJ wasn't her usual stoic self. On anyone else, Lapis would have said they looked a little shaken. For Jasper, however, 'a little shaken' required an earthquake, which Lapis had apparently delivered.

A part of her was smugly proud of that.

"Citrine helped us," insisted Jasper. "Peridot too. Said so in her journal." She shifted her position despite being as close to inexhaustible as you could get. "I wanted to help her."

"And get your fuse on," snapped Lapis accusingly.

Jasper gave the impression of a flinch.

Lapis' expression softened some. OJ being an ass was one thing, but her looking... vulnerable? Lapis felt a lot less enthusiastic kicking her when she was like that.

"Okay," she conceded. "You probably were trying to help her." In a strained voice and through gritted teeth she said, "That was... part of what you tried to bring with... us."

_Wow, that was hard to say. Deep, calm breaths, Lazuli._

The moment stretched out between them and then Jasper met Lapis' eyes, expression intent if still vulnerable. "If you were weak like Peridot-" and this time it was Lapis' turn to flinch. "-You would want that too, right?"

Lapis opened her mouth to object... but stopped, mouth closing wordlessly. If Rose had brought a Moissanite box big enough for the whole Earth, she'd probably have gone on an emotional joyride, slipping the leash and letting her moods swing freely. Yeah, it would've sucked sooner or later, probably sooner, but for a while it'd have been Atlas getting to set down that dang heavy planet and go for a walk. 

But Jasper wasn't really asking that. OJ was looking at Dot and thinking of a Jasper without her super-Quartz-ness. And unlike Lapis, Jasper was completely comfortable in her skin. No, she was perfect and it was the rest of the world that needed to improve. But a Jasper who was suddenly rendered small and weak and fragile? That'd be a Jasper in dire need of a hug.

Possibly that full-body hug that only fusion could give.

Taking a moment to tell her inner-Connie just how not fun this maturity business could be, Lapis nodded and said what Jasper needed to hear. "Yeah, I would want the help. But I don't think that's the kind of help that'd be good for me, and I don't think it's the kind that's good for Dot either."

A beat and then Jasper nodded, eyes not quite meeting Lapis' and a little sad. No, apologetic, and this really was shaping up to be a day for the record books as far as unpredictable conversations. "No more," added the gruff gem a little later.

Lapis smiled back, genuinely proud of Jasper. And herself, actually. Okay, maybe this maturity stuff wasn't all bad. Wanting to say something a little nice to end on, she said, "But later, when Dot's in a better place, you can have your fusion fun. Like you said, it's allowed now, at least when we're doing it right and for the right reasons."

Eyes snapping to stare directly into Lapis', the Quartz asked, "And someday, do you think we could too?"

Hurricane Malachite blew through Lapis --Con-con would probably have seen a heckuva show if she'd peeked at Lapis' ‘scape just then-- but the gem found it a little less terrible than usual, the storm surge of guilt, revulsion, and desire not reaching its usual intensity. Clenching small, blue fists and taking a deep breath, slowly Lapis nodded, managing to choke out, "Maybe. Someday."

She didn't stick around after that.

Forget peeking in on BM. Lapis was officially done with today, exiting Jasper's room only for the temple door to close and then immediately reopen on her own room. She fled into its wet and familiar expanse, the ruined buildings drunkenly leaning and/or mostly submerged just the way she'd left them.

No, she was done with today, and if it tried to come for her, it'd have to drag her out of her room kicking and screaming.

But in the tumult of her own thoughts, a brown-skinned figure with wings awarded Lapis a Connie-point for good behavior. The blue gem glowed at the unfamiliar warmth.

Then, in Lapis’ imagination, the shoulder Connie gestured at her own adorably stubby body and said, _Now could you make me a bit less chibi? How am I supposed to swing a sword with little hamster arms like these?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lapis' description of Jasper's room was a little nod to [Cyberwraith9](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyberwraith9/pseuds/Cyberwraith9)'s excellent Jasper-centric omake, [Still and Silent.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10673391/chapters/23849106)
> 
> EDIT: The talented and ever excellent [NeonJohn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeonJohn/pseuds/NeonJohn) has drawn not only Lapis' imagined shoulder angel Connie, but _also_ a shoulder devil Connie to match! Truly, he is a gentleman and a scholar. [salutes]  

> 
> * * *
> 
> If you have a Connie Swap story burning in your soul that you want to see in our official, curated Omake collection, drop us a comment either in the Omake fic or here in the main fic and we'll get in touch.
> 
> Connie Swap has an official Discord for the fans. [Come check it out.](https://discord.gg/RQMDdhr)
> 
> As usual, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments and your asks at the [Connie Swap Tumblr](http://connieswap.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


	10. Rose Epilogue

Rose 'awoke' and there was the curious feeling of being other. She feigned bewilderment as she gathered her bearings, but it was a lie supported by a fair measure of truth and all the more believable for it.

Breath fogged the chill, early morning air. She was sitting on the ground in the grassy area in front of a human home. A look found eight other humans in the area, all adults, three of which were nearby and looking at her.

Normally she liked to wait until another human spoke before she said anything. It could provide helpful context, not least of all what language she should be speaking. However, she had visited Beach City enough in recent days to recognize it and so said in English, "Oops. I'm okay. Don't worry," and she flashed a smile meant to look reassuring and slightly embarrassed.

The closest human, a man with kind eyes and a long, dark beard like a Quartz mane in miniature, chuckled and said, "Good lad. No snow but there's still frost to look out for." He walked over and offered her a hand, which she took and realized she was wearing rugged gloves and heavy clothing. Something that was probably a scarf rubbed against her neck as the human helped her to her feet. "You be careful. Fortunately your bucket didn't spill when you did."

Looking around, Rose found the bucket, shards of broken glass and damaged shingles were piled high within, along with other assorted debris. Rose bent and lifted it up, finding it unwieldy but not too heavy for her in this vessel.

She guessed she was male given the 'lad' remark and upper body strength, but she'd been surprised before. Not that it really mattered for her purposes.

There was a large metal box called a dumpster nearby. Given how few humans there were in Beach City since her ill-fated assault, she'd 'awoken' in these workers before and therefore had an inkling of what she was supposed to do.

Lugging the bucket over, she emptied its contents into the dumpster. The sound of glass shards falling like rain sent a chill through Rose, half revulsion and half fascination. Humans reacted instinctively to the sight of blood, she knew, and the sound of falling shards was something similar for her kind.

Setting the bucket down, Rose looked around for witnesses. There were at least six humans visible, but most were working. One, a spindly young man and helper of the Quartz-beard, was looking her way, but his demeanor spoke of low status and insecurity. He'd wonder at her departure but he wasn't likely to act on his own and be a nuisance. Good.

Rose turned and walked down the street in the direction of the hill and the ruined spire. No, what had she heard it called during a past visit? Ah, a lighthouse. It was a useful landmark to navigate the town.

There was an uncertain, "Hey, uh, where..." behind her but Rose didn't slow or look back. Act like you know where you're going, like you belong, and others will assume the confusion is their own.

A vehicle heavy with rebuilding materials drove slowly past. One of the humans within waved, presumably the one piloting it but Rose knew little of their operation beyond the obvious. The Earth had changed little in five thousand years, but humanity had and with every vessel she entered she saw new and fascinating things.

Rose pretended she didn't notice the wave and walked on, turning the corner at the foot of the lighthouse hill and heading for the building with the big, round food statue on top. If she were planning on inhabiting this vessel longer then she'd make the effort to blend in better, but this was a scouting mission, plain and simple; the latest of several.

It was such a shame she hadn't discovered this power until after the war, because she could have put it to such use. It had been quite helpful as she'd consolidated her new power base in Homeworld space. She'd never dared use it on a Diamond, the risk associated was simply too great, but when leaks threatened to reveal things she very much didn't want the Diamonds to know of, it was invaluable.

Stepping down from the pavement to the beach below, the cliffs to her left and the ocean grey in the pre-dawn light to her right, Rose couldn't help but reminisce as she approached her sister's base-turned-temple. In the early days of the Rebellion, they'd established camps in unfinished or ruined structures. Never out in the open, or never for long, because Homeworld always found them eventually and the skies belonged to Homeworld then.

The temple was a bunker built by Pink Diamond. That wasn't obvious from the outside, but her dutiful Pearl had told Rose a great many things, going so far as to draw a detailed map of the region and pointing out the temple's location. Cross-referencing that with the records her authority afforded her access to, Rose had been able to learn that Pink Diamond had ordered a dozen bunkers _quietly_ built in various places across the globe. Space folding would allow the bunkers to contain entire squadrons without being conspicuous, especially if built into caves or mountainsides. With a warp pad to interconnect them, these would serve as hidden staging grounds from which Pink Diamond's forces could sortie out to counter the elusive Rebellion menace.

Each powered by a warship-grade crystal heart, the bunkers would house all manner of useful facilities and resources in addition to soldiers. Each was a miniature fortress hidden from view and an inspired counter to the war Rose and Citrine, together and later separately, had been waging against their Diamond.

Then Blue and Yellow Diamond had stepped in to finish off this ongoing embarrassment of a rebellion and all such clever initiatives were swept aside and forgotten.

Citrine had found this one at some point after the Schism and made it her own. Rose hadn't learned of it until well after the war, which was why there was a temple here instead of an ancient crater. Rose had been reluctant at first to divulge Rebellion secrets to Homeworld, but as the Schism waned and her terrible sister grew ever closer to reuniting the Rebellion under her banner, that reluctance had also waned.

By the time her Diamond had welcomed her back into the fold, Rose would have handed the coordinates to this base over to Yellow Diamond's Hessonite herself... contingent on her getting to watch the bombardment personally.

The statue of her sister's fusion had been sculpted after the war. She must have thought herself safe to be willing to advertise its location like this. Had she really been so convinced of the totality of her victory?

Rose made a noise of disgust, the scoff coming out sounding strangely from the unfamiliar throat. Of course she was confident. Why should she be afraid like Rose or frustrated like Rose or driven to the brink and beyond like Rose?! She was Citrine, victory personified, and neither Rose or Homeworld itself could stop her inevitable triumph.

Her jaw ached from clenching her teeth in a rictus snarl and Rose had to remind herself not to damage something. She had no healing tears like this and a mission still to complete. Besides, an injured human was conspicuous, more so than a human that had wandered off and wouldn't be able to explain why afterwards.

She heard someone call out behind her but she didn't stop to look. With luck the shout was meant for someone else, or the person would lose interest if she kept walking away.

Rounding the cliff, she saw the temple, damaged by time and her warship but resolute. Seeing _her_, even carved in stone, even with Jasper and Lapis' features blended in, it made a part of Rose quail, her vessel shivering in reaction to her rush of fear. A surge of rage followed, as if the fear could be countered (or hidden) if she was just angry enough.

Rose stood there, shaking and breathing hard, gloved fists clenched as she struggled with the twin desires to run far, far away and to attack, to hammer and pound until no such likeness remained.

Until she was safe.

She was never safe. She would never be safe while any fraction of her sister remained.

But being in a vessel helped. Rose wasn't here, not really. She was far, far away, hidden in a cave while her dutiful Pearl worked on her devices, while her steadfast Garnet smuggled them components and wormed her way deeper into The Crystal gems' confidence. They couldn't hurt her, _she_ couldn't hurt her, not really.

They would only be hurting a human.

"Steven?"

Rose turned around and it was only because of millennia of practice that she didn't scream.

"Steven!"

Her niece ran her way, clad head-to-toe in winter clothing, a bulky bag containing multiple boxes held in one mitten'd hand. She dropped the bag a few feet before reaching her and threw her arms around Rose, the gem having to fall deep into her role so as not to let the mask slip. It helped that _her_ gemstone was covered by the clothing.

Rose started to hug the hybrid back when her niece gave her a peck on the lips and buried her head in Rose's scarf-wrapped neck.

Who in the _empty sky_ is this human she's inhabiting? Was this Steven really someone so important to her niece? If so, this upped the risk and reward for this mission considerably.

Connie's embrace cooled and she stepped back, looking at Rose. She looked confused, maybe even a little apprehensive but her niece was... hard to read. There was just something about her nature that confounded Rose's instincts, a lesson she'd learned dramatically more than once.

"I thought you were doing work crew stuff?" she asked, gesturing to the rugged gloves on Rose's hands.

"They needed more supplies," lied Rose, past conversations overheard in similar vessels providing the right content. "So I got to take a break. And came here," she added with a slight smile.

Connie looked like she was going to say something to that but fortunately the hybrid's attention was broken by a large yawn.

Good. Her being sleepy would help with what came next.

"Tired?" asked Rose, because humans and gems alike were put at ease when the obvious was stated.

Connie nodded again and started to answer when a second yawn interrupted her. Her cheeks became flushed, either from cold or embarrassment or something else entirely --Rose reminded herself not to take anything as a given, not with Connie, not with Citrine-- and she stooped to pick up her bulky bag, nodding as she did.

Rose stepped forward and gallantly took the bag, cradling it in her arms. A glance inside showed four boxes labeled Nokia _RagnarTök_, whatever that meant.

This earned a smile from her niece and also meant that Rose’s hands would be full, convenient because it meant Connie would take the lead. If this Steven had a key to a locked Beach House door, for example, Rose would have an excuse not to have to retrieve it and reveal her ignorance.

"Yeah, I know I offered to help, but I forgot how early it started and stayed up too late last night," explained the hybrid.

Rose gave her a questioning look. No words; words were a risk best avoided when possible.

Connie, walking at Rose's side, hung her head a little and said, "Mom's been monopolizing the holodeck trying to design the drill-"

Rose noted the reference to 'Mom,' a detail worth filing away. It was almost certainly the Peridot she was referring to. But then Rose's thoughts ground to a halt as she mentally cried _Drill?!_

There were many implications with that and she didn't like most of them.

"-but she had to go back to her workshop for a few hours and, um, I found a recording my mother had made where she was teaching me how to hula dance."

Connie was blushing more fiercely than before and she gave Rose a side glance. Clearly some response was needed.

"Hula dance?" answered Rose, adjusting the bundle in her arms.

A half-smile came to her niece's face. "Yeah. It turns out my mother was really into it, had a whole kinda Polynesian side to her, though the lei and little hula doll in her room should have been clue enough. But the weird thing was that it wasn't her teaching me to dance. Obviously. I didn't exist yet." She wrapped her arms around herself, leaning into Rose a little as they approached the Beach House. "Instead she had this hologram she was calling Connie. It had features like my dad's and like my mother's, but it didn't really look like me. It was uncanny." 

They ascended the stairs in silence before she added with a huff, "I still can't decide if the whole thing was sweet or sad or what."

"She was thinking of you," said Rose, experience keeping the tremor out of her voice.

Her niece nodded. "Yeah, or at least the me she had in her mind." Another blush as she retrieved her keys and unlocked the door. "I maaay have put myself in the holo-Connie's place after a couple viewings and practiced hula while staying up too late last night." Her grin was impish but sleepy.

They stepped inside and Connie said, "Oh, sorry about the clutter. Mom was in and out of her workshop, tinkering last night. She's... It's harder for her to keep the place tidy, I think."

Sure enough, there were bits of metal and various tools scattered about, mostly on the silvery coffee table that looked a lot like Bismuth's handiwork. Rose drank in the details of the building’s interior as much as she could without looking obvious about it. Or rather, she did until she noticed a large, yellow, furry _thing_ sprawled out on its back across the couch.

It was Citrine's. Somehow it belonged to her sister, she could see that, but at the same time-

As if poked by something sharp, the yellow creature --a wolf she now saw, but far larger than any she'd seen before-- rolled off the couch and looked around, locking eyes with her. A growl rose in its throat.

"Wha- Wolf!" scolded her niece.

This Wolf went quiet for a second, looking to Connie before turning back to Rose, his ears pinned flat against his head, the growl returned and louder. There was something, something elusive but... familiar about Wolf and Rose wished desperately she understood what.

He advanced forward a step, hackles raising to make an already large animal loom larger.

"Wolf what are you-" but the animal ignored Connie as it advanced with clear, violent intent.

"Get back!" shouted Rose, unnerved but also acting the part of a frightened and fragile human.

The beast lurched back a step as if its body had acted on its own. His eyes were wide, first in confusion, then in fear for, unlike her niece, Rose could read him very well indeed.

Before she could open her mouth to say more, however, he sprung back, sprinting for the back of the house, a loud howl cutting off anything she could say.

A swirling vortex opened, swallowed him up, and then vanished a second later.

Connie had actually pulled a saber, prepared to defend Rose against the beast, and wasn't that a delicious irony. Keeping the blade held tightly, the hybrid surveyed the room for threats in a way that looked very Jasper-like. Finding none, she approached Rose, saying, "I don't know what that was about at all! Are you okay? What happened?"

For some reason she reached up and wiggled her ears.

Rose wandered over toward the couch, an impression and yellow fur showing it to be a common bed for the beast. Had her Pearl not known of Wolf? It might have been a lie, if only by omission, but she didn't think for a second it had been deliberate. If there was any gem in this entire, cruel universe that Rose could trust, it was Pearl. No, a rebuke would leave Pearl chastened; there was no need for punishment.

Garnet, however, must have known something. She had her blind spots and she had always been cryptic, even during the war, but Rose would need to have a talk with her lieutenant.

Setting the bag down, Rose shook her head. "I'm fine, I think." Always good to leave doubts, doubts could be exploited later. "I'm just confused."

Her niece nodded, sheathed her sword, and did something fluttery with her hands. She was looking at her expectantly.

Rose gave a noncommittal head bob and then made herself yawn. Tired humans could be hazy on all sorts of details when asked, after all. "I shouldn't be tired after that," said Rose with easy humor, "but, like you said, it's really early."

Connie blinked. "Yeah, early. No morning people here," and did something else with her hands.

She should have been paying more attention to whatever that was but Rose had made a mistake stepping into the room and turning around. She'd made a mistake because it meant she could see her sister's portrait now, there, hanging over the entryway. When she'd peered through the Beach House windows days before in that tiny, pale vessel she'd been completely unable to see it there. Ignoring _her_ looking down on her was proving extremely distracting.

Mentally replaying her niece's words, Rose gave a casual shrug and said, "No, I guess not."

Connie relaxed though she didn't smile. Was she satisfied with the answer? Rose was about to divert attention back to what had just happened with Wolf when her niece said, "Yeah, Wolf almost never does that." She stared at Rose for a second. "What helped last time was going and getting some of his favorite food out of Lapis' room. You know, raw chicken."

That sounded plausible, but Rose didn't like the idea of bringing others into this, certainly not Lapis. Something had happened between the assault and the clash onboard the warship to make the blue gem much harder to manipulate.

"No, it's okay," insisted Rose. "Can we just talk instead? Why do you think Wolf did that?"

Connie pulled a communicator out of her pocket. "Hmm, I have a thought. Let me just send you something."

Something in Rose's pocket chimed. Fishing it out, she was relieved to see that a preview of the message from her niece appeared on the screen without requiring Rose to enter a password. Unfortunately, it read:  
_* CoMa - 06:35am | thsadbgisa1._

Rose looked up from the communicator. She had no idea how to reply to that. It wasn't in any language because it was gibberish. Or a code. Against another opponent, Rose might have tried to bluster her way out of this; Rose Quartzes knew empathy, after all, and to understand another was to be able to manipulate them.

But against her oh-so-confounding niece...

She let the communicator drop from her hand. Expression commanding, pretense removed from her voice, Rose said, "We're going to talk. Now."

"Who are you?!" shouted Connie, the saber back in her hand.

Rose snatched up a screwdriver off the table. A long, _sharp_ screwdriver. Her niece tensed as if expecting an attack.

_"I said,_ we're going to talk-" She gave a wink because she was enjoying this. "-dear niece."

To her credit, the hybrid only hesitated a second before advancing quickly, weapon out in a well-practiced defensive position. She stopped in her tracks, eyes huge with shock the instant Rose pointed the screwdriver at her own throat.

"Drop the sword."

The sword clattered to the floor.

"Humans are such fragile things, aren't they?" purred Rose, feeling the metal against the skin of her throat. "I know you're far from disarmed, but I'm confident I could hurt this vessel before you could stop me. I'm someone special, aren't I? Steven, he's a friend? Something more, even? Well, you're going to tell Steven exactly what he wants to know and then you're going to do exactly what he tells you to do or he's-"

Her niece's face had gone pale, then paler, but then something had changed, as if the rush of fear had been overwhelmed by a surge of rage that followed. Expression taut, cheeks flushed with anger, the hybrid cut her off as she shouted, "Get your hands off my St-"

The end of the sentence was met with silence as her niece turned translucent, a brilliant glow shining from her chest.

In a cave far, far away a sleeping figure was suddenly engulfed in a bubble, startling the delicate gem busy at a workbench nearby.

But Rose wasn't in that cave, not fully, nor was she in her bubble. She felt the touch of that hated presence within her, felt a terror that was only partially induced grip her so completely the screwdriver fell from her fingers before she could do more than leave a scrape.

The glow of her niece's gemstone redoubled into something too painful to look at, so blinding Rose could no longer see the rictus of righteous fury on Connie’s see-through face. All her defenses denied her, Rose felt something inside her strain, strain and then _tear,_ first once, then again and again and...

* * *

In a cave far, far away a figure was weeping, weeping endlessly but the tears could not heal her for it was not her body that was injured. Defense and offense, healing and harming, body and mind. 

Thus had always been the duality between the sisters.

The pale and graceful gem attending her pulled all manner of things from her gemstone, vials and bandages and other medicines as well, but all to no avail.

It would heal in time. A small corner of Rose recognized this, just like she had recognized her sister's presence in Wolf. Just like the adjustments Citrine could make would revert, so too would this, but how soon? For all her intuition, she had no idea and she quaked.

But as bad as the pain was, the fear was even worse. She was supposed to be safe while inhabiting a vessel. They weren't supposed to be able to reach her, but they had, _she_ had.

Nowhere was safe. Not for Rose. Not from _her_.

The weeping figure's eyes fluttered open briefly and she saw her Pearl standing over her, frantic with worry.

_Help. Me,_ Rose mouthed before her eyes fluttered shut.

Afraid, hurt, Rose fled.

* * *

A woman was feeding chickens when the bucket of corn dropped from her hands. She collapsed to her knees and began to weep. A minute later the presence vanished; she shouted in surprise at the hens mobbing her corn-strewn feet. How had she ended up on her knees and why were her cheeks wet?

* * *

A man was fleeing, a pyramid behind him so overgrown and weathered as to be all but indistinguishable from the surrounding jungle. He dropped his sack of archeological tools and scrambled to snatch them up when an angry roar sent him fleeing blindly down the game trail ahead of him.

Maybe thirty yards further and he staggered, suddenly heedless to whatever may be behind him. He leaned against a tree and wept, slowly dropping to the jungle floor as foliage rustled ominously.

Then he blinked, there was another roar, and the man was running pell-mell ahead, swatting greenery aside as he made a mad dash for the distant safety of his soon-to-be-vacated campsite.

* * *

A mother asked her child what was wrong. Wiping tears from his eyes, the four-year-old said he didn't know.

* * *

The patient in room 226 of the recently renovated Crossroads Hospital wailed. The two nurses at the nurse station exchanged looks, one of them rising to his feet.

The sobbing stopped as abruptly as it came.

Going to check anyway, the nurse was halfway down the hall when the patient in 228 was bawling. Hand on the door, the noise went quiet and then in 231 came crying.

The other nurse entered a code which paged another nurse station for support. The patient in 225 was tearful immediately after but by the time reinforcements arrived, the whole, weird phenomenon had passed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi Rose. Bye Rose. Still, like a good aunt, Rose helped Connie learn something new, namely how to deliver mind whammy like no other. I doubt Rose is proud of that, though.
> 
> The in-chapter art was drawn by BurdenKing.
> 
> The reference to Connie using the holosuite to hula dance with Citrine is a reference to not just an old CS omake, but _the oldest:_ [Citrine's Room](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10673391/chapters/23628408) (distinct from the Ep16 minisode of the same name). This in turn was inspired by this wonderful old piece of art by MJ:  

> 
> And so we finally come to the conclusion of _Injecting Some Fun_. Per our schedule, we'll be taking a week off between episodes, so you can expect some omake content to go up this Wednesday. However, join us Wednesday, September 25th for the start of **Episode 38: Reap What Was Sown**
>
>>   
The Cluster must be stopped, but first it must be reached and studied. Meanwhile P2 and Amethyst are still at large with goals of their own, the most urgent of which is finding a way off this doomed planet. And to top it off, it's Harvest Festival and the Beach City evacuees are returning home. Everyone and everything is coming back for the holidays, including the errors of the past.
> 
> Edit: Bingo!  

> 
> Also, to all the fine folks with omakes waiting for me to review 'em, as well as everyone who has been waiting a week or more for a response to their AO3 comments, with Ep37 completed I'll be catching up on that backlog ASAP. Getting all of this episode out, in-full and on-time meant I had to push everything else to the side, but now I can finally circle back. Thanks for your patience, everyone!
> 
> * * *
> 
> If you have a Connie Swap story burning in your soul that you want to see in our official, curated Omake collection, drop us a comment either in the Omake fic or here in the main fic and we'll get in touch.
> 
> Connie Swap has an official Discord for the fans. [Come check it out.](https://discord.gg/RQMDdhr)
> 
> As usual, we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments and your asks at the [Connie Swap Tumblr](http://connieswap.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> Keeping track of all the updates to Connie Swap can get a little difficult, can't it? It doesn't have to be! If you go to the [Connie Swap Series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/630527) page and click the "**Subscribe**" button then you will receive an email alert every time a new episode is posted or a new chapter is added to _ANY_ fic in Connie Swap.
> 
> One button. All the updates.


End file.
